Smart ForTwo reviews

Small and not the best for motorway, but cheap to run, easy to park in small spaces.

A rollcage on wheels with very comfotable seats. Performs very well and is extremely economical. However,once it reaches approximately 75,000 miles or above there is a good chance you will need to replace the engine. I bought my smart as a runaround until my range rover was repaired that was seven years ago. I am a fan of the Smart.

I have been running a diesel Smart for 4 years and generally find it more practical than I expected. It's not at all uncomfortable on journeys of up to 150 miles or so, and the luggage space is adequate for most purposes. As you'd expect it's economical, though not to the level of the official mileage; I have achieved almost exactly 60mpg over 4 years, with mainly urban but occasional longer motorway or cross country journeys. It has some idiosyncrasies (like the need to be very careful to fully engage the handbrake when parked on a slope) and is slow to accelerate, and although it's happy enough on the motorway at 75mph, you shouldn't expect to go any faster. The slightly elevated driving position is a plus; I like the precision of not having power steering and not being too heavy to handle; the stereo system is surprisingly good.

Smart are a statement car. They say "look at me, I am modern and concerned about being nice to the world". The shame about it is that you sacrifice any practical functionality to deliver that concern. This is what I noted through three years of driving a natty little German rear-engined, two-seater back and forth to London three times a week for three years. They have a tiny engine mounted under the rear floor which for the size and weight of the car should really deliver a lot more performance. The rear (boot) space is tiny - about big enough for one suitcase or three bags of shopping. Leg room is amazing - it is huge - I am 6'2 and a neighbour who is 6'4 and I both sat in comfortably. Although quite narrow, the seats are staggered so you aren't rubbing shoulders with each other. The eco stop-start is badly thought out. As soon as the vehicle gets below a slow walk (not necessarily stopped) the engine cuts out, there is no delay. Then when you take your foot off the brake it starts, but the start is not terribly quick - over a second. It may not sound much but if you are creeping forward in traffic, this makes your stops annoying and intrusive. It would have been far better and so simple to have a two-second delay so you only turn off the engine when you really mean it - i.e. when stopped for a prolonged period. I am not convinced the feature really saves that much fuel as the energy to start the engine isn't free and often is more than that saved with a momentary stop of half a second. More often than not I turned it off in traffic as it made the car un-responsive and annoying to drive. The engine mounted right behind the seats also made it a very noisy. On the subject of un-responsive, we come to the gear box. The gear changes are unbelievable long - I reckon close to two seconds each - no BS! The gearbox wakes up in automatic mode and when accelerating hard there is this prolonged pause in power followed by a lurch as the next gear up engages. Not a pleasant drive and often the subject of exclamation from amazed passengers. Also the gearbox is not pre-emptive; (i.e. as you decelerate, it should guess what gear you'll be needing next and be in it with the engine revs in mid-range) it is always in the ideal gear for the road speed - even down to the bottom of the rev range. I found this to be down-right dangerous... you could float up to a busy junction (say a roundabout) see your gap and jump in it... at which point the gearbox would kick down and you find yourself trickling across the junction with a HGV bearing down on you while the gearbox went through its nasty two-second tea-dance. Scary! Then there is the (un-turn-off-able) traction control. This nearly marooned me in the snow three times on one journey! Sometimes you need a controlled wheel-spin just to dig down through a bit of fresh-but-churned-up snow to get to the road surface and get you up that hill... not a chance... soon as you try, you get a flashing yellow triangle on the dash and the EMU is deciding that what you really need is a cold, desolate, late-night walk to the nearest civilization. If it got really bad it even cut the engine! Positively dangerous. I have a flat road approach to my house but when we had 5" of snow a few years back, I had to park on the main road because I could not push through the ridge of snow between car tracks to turn into my street! The EMU would not let me - I approach the turn nice and slow, little bit of power to push through the snow, Oh No! bit of slip and there we have the flashing triangle and the transmission disengages. I might add my current car has this feature but I can turn it off at the touch of a button - Vauxhall (and many other manufacturers) at least recognise that sometimes drivers need to step outside what is conventionally accepted. Desperate times and all that... The gearbox could be put in a manual mode - sort of... it had a + and - sprung position so you could sort of drive it like a manual. To be honest I rarely did because the rev-range of the gears (where this would be useful) was finished so quickly because of having to keep the almost torque-free engine in its comfort zone. The up/down function was also mimicked by flappy paddles either side of the steering wheel but the design of these was ridiculous - not the paddles themselves but the fact they were mounted on the back of the steering wheel - that's right... not the steering column - which meant they went round with the wheel... you could never tell where they where! Ridiculous and poorly thought out. Between the engine and the gear-box, a long journey left the car feeling weary and me needing a coffee! On the slightly more mundane, the interior was very basic - I mean really basic. Even the wacky little pods couldn't hide the poorly thought-out design... take the coin slot in front of the gear selector - just right for a few quid coins for the toll right? WRONG! these slots were only wide enough for a tupenny piece! Really Smart? you couldn't have worked out the width of a one or two pound coin? This is a small point but totally indicative of the good ideas badly executed that made running this car for three years a disappointment bordering on embarassing. The glove compartment... there was no lid so all your stuff on the shelf became a tornado if you had the window open - another thing you couldn't use. This also meant you had nowhere to keep the owners manual so when you needed it, it was at home and you were stuck in the bundoo wondering what that light means and why the damned thing won't start! Windows were the annoying "tap me for all the way, hold me for your desires" - the worst choice - you could never just open the window a crack. It was always down and then back up to where you wanted. Fuel economy: OK, you don't own a Smart for its panache and the use of the word "Smart" is evidently ironic but they pay dividends in the fuel department right? Wrong again!!! I am not a cautious driver but I do settle down and give in to the commute - resigned to the whims of the M1/A41. But... to attain the booked 85MPG you would have to be the most annoying person to follow... never making progress, miles of traffic stretched out behind you, the empty road ahead beckoning as you pootle along at 35MPH everywhere out of town. The best I ever got out of it was 55MPG... to be honest that is downright criminal from such a tiny engine in a car that weighs virtually nothing... but that is the problem isn't it? The engine is so feeble that you have to DRIVE it to get anything like normal performance from it and then the economy joins the coin slot - a good idea but not something that is realistic. I am getting the same MPG from my Astra - that has a 1700cc engine can carry five people at a push and has a proper dashpocket. Without wishing to sound negative, this car was a 3 year experiment and I am struggling to think of anything I liked about it... even the legendary parking ability has been watered down by the lengthening of the chassis to try and improve the pogo-stick like ride quality (and failing). Ummm... suspension was very stiff - cornering was good, but then the tiny wheels made every pot-hole a terrifying, bone-jarring slam of an experience. Honestly I expected to have sheared a wheel clean-off on more than one occasion. Hmmm.... what DID I like..? cheap road tax... and that is about it. sorry!

Over the last 35 years I must have had over a dozen cars, some from new, some used,including Honda, Escort, Morris Minor, Fiat, Mini (x3) Daewoo, Spitfire, and of them all, the Smart is by far the favourite. I would hope to buy an ex-demo model to replace the existing one in the next 3-3 years. The only negative is that the suspension is a little hard. I would recommend them to anyone wanting a small 2 seater car.

A very deceptive car.it is much faster than most people realise and has more room for the driver and passenger than my last car which was a 5 series BMW. It cost £20/ year tax and is a remarkably reliable and inexpensive vehicle to run. I regularly drive it to both Germany and to Edinburgh and one forgets after the first few minutes about its size as it just feels like any other medium sized saloon car. It is not a good car for pot holes in third world countries such as the UK however.