Review: Smart Fortwo Passion Cabriolet

the smallest car on the road

February 2008 By Brett Solomon

multipage

A preface about myself. I really love automobiles. Somewhere in my bloodstream might be a little 93 octane swirled around with the hemoglobin. The downfall to this is that it does have a Pollyanna effect on my stance with vehicles—I always can find the good in them. Especially when it comes to my specialty and deep passion—vehicle technology. Vehicle technology coupled with environmentally friendly design and fuel consumption is especially appealing to me. Mega SUV or small runabout, every vehicle has a purpose in the vehicle landscape and a designer behind it who brought some features to the limelight. The smart fortwo Passion Cabriolet is an interesting vehicle. It was designed in Europe as a city car—a runabout designed to squeeze into the tightest parking spots and drink the minimum amount of gas. Its design was assisted by Swiss watchmaker Swatch to add trendiness and then brought to life by engineers at Mercedes. Moreover, it was designed to be cuter than a boxful of puppy pugs. Hell, one even sits on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (but to be honest I do not "get" a lot of things on display at MoMA). By the time you read this, The smart should be arriving at Penske-affiliated auto dealerships in large cities. As much as I can try to pile the praise on this vehicle, I just don’t get it. It certainly isn’t for me, and again, I appreciate all automobiles.

My smart experience started in the mean streets of Manhattan where one of the first vehicles in the United States was available for demonstration purposes. My wife was with me to pick up the vehicle and upon first sight exclaimed “Omigod! Is this really safe?” I spent the previous night cruising YouTube and watching the dwarfed automobile hit a concrete wall at 80 MPH and then deflect itself off of a Mercedes E-Class with minimal damage to the crash test dummies. “Absolutely, let’s go!” I told my wife.

The first problems started when the parking garage attendant could not get the car started. I got in and had a look. No fault of the battery or the electronics systems, just the odd gearshift that needs to be put in the ‘reverse’ direction to fire up the soda-bottle-sized 1.0 liter 3-cylinder engine. We charged up the parking garage ramp but needed to insert a keycard into a slot to allow the automatic gate to open. No problem, I’ll just throw the car in park while I fish around for the keycard... Oh wait, there is no “park” on the gearshift. I pulled up the emergency brake with the car still in drive, found the card, and then off we went. (Smart officials say there will be some changes to the awkward gear level on the production version to make it more friendly to North American motorists accustomed to seeing “Park, Neutral, and Reverse” on their gearshift selectors.) More on the gearshift and the transmission later.

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