smart fortwo

Rented a Smart forTwo from ACE LAS for $11/day earlier this month. This is one of the car I seriously considered as my next commute car. Now I have a chance to a 4-day test drive.

First, it's really not that small for one driver or even with a passenger. Decent storage space in the back for something of that size. Great leg room.

Second, it is very small. I literally sit on the rear wheel. When making a turn, it's like turning around sitting on my office chair. Not so much in low speed, but I did took time to get use to it while driving at 90mph on I-105.

Yes, it's surprisingly stable even when driving at high speed. The fastest I got it to was around 95mph. I didn't know how fast I was driving (I was just following the traffic, officer) until looking at the speedometer. For a small car, the acceleration is not bad. It helped greatly that the car I had doesn't have power steering.

Being a very short car (100 in), it does offer some benefits. First, if you can see the car in the next lane from the side mirror, you can definitely change lane since there's plenty of space in-between.

Of course the greatest benefit is on street parking. Can you image that I was even looking forward to a place that I can park on street in Westwood and Beverly Hills? Since there's always a tight spot nobody else can park into, I was almost certain that I can find free on-street parking in Westwood during lunch hour.

There's one day I was running to a lunch meeting in Beverly Hills, I found a parking spot on a small street off 3rd st. Since it's a very narrow street, I initially try to let the cars behind me to pass first before trying to park into the tight (even for a smart) spot. The two ladies in the car pulled over and told me "we're not leaving, just want to see how you park that little cute thing into that spot."

The pictures below are the parking job. It took me about 3 minutes to get into.

Now here comes the not so great part. The main thing is that the automatic transmission sucks. It's like I was on a car driven by someone trying the stick-shift the first time. I eventually had to switch to the manual-automatic shift.

A minor problem is that one needs to read the manual before getting the radio to work, at least for me.

The small thing was good on gas, but not great. For the 200 miles I drove with mixed highway and local driving, I got about 40mpg, close to the EPA highway estimate, but lower than I had expected for such a small car.

The verdict, a nice alternative to Prius but not such a smart buy right now, at least not until Mercedes fixes the automatic transmission or just offers a stick-shift option.