Field Of Dreams (Part 7) - Smart ForTwo ED Cabriolet

We totally buy the concept of the Smart

The Smart’s last-place finish isn’t the result of some grudge against tiny vehicles, even ones that look like Willy Wonka’s car if Willy Wonka ran a Ukrainian cathouse. We totally buy the concept of the Smart, even applaud the former DaimlerChrysler for first putting it into production way back in 1998. We just don’t buy its execution. In striving so earnestly to be different, Smart forgot to make a good car.

The handling is just bizarre. The steering is epically slow, and it’s nearly impossible to take a clean line through a corner as the front and rear ends quibble over which way to go. From overhead, your path would look octagonal. Heading straight down a highway, your senses are prodded to confusion by strange side forces as the car stumbles over bumps and suddenly gets the wiggles for no obvious reason. The floor-mounted brake pedal is abrupt. Even if you never leave the city, where the Smart is designed to thrive, you’ll still live in fear of hard stops, hard rights, and curved on-ramps.

Because it’s extremely light, at 2113 pounds, the Smart’s modest 17.6-kWh battery didn’t produce the shortest range

Some of its dynamic, er, shortcomings, plus the choppy ride, are simply inherent in a tall vehicle put on a 73.5-inch wheel-base. We can thus forgive the Smart for some of its eccentricities, especially since this is the only car offering a retracting softtop despite being the second-cheapest in the test.

Because it’s extremely light, at 2113 pounds, the Smart’s modest 17.6-kWh battery didn’t produce the shortest range. That dubious honor went to the Fit EV. The Smart also wasn’t as pokey as the Leaf or Focus, and it has no trouble pacing traffic – as long as traffic is moving slower than its governed 78-mph top speed.

The steering is epically slow, and it’s nearly impossible to take a clean line through a corner as the front and rear ends quibble over which way to go

However, what bugs us most is that in fulfilling its government requirement, Smart has phoned it in. While the other vehicles in the comparo show you through their navigation systems where to find the nearest charging stations, the Smart tells you where to find the nearest gas stations. The company didn’t even change that. The only info you get on energy consumption, range, and battery state-of-charge is via some very rudimentary gauges on the dash and in the digital cluster. Compared with the other, it’s a bare effort, though you can at least program the charging time to take advantage of late-night utility rates.

The Smart looks like an electric car even when it’s not. If this is the de facto poster boy for the class, the class needs a new poster.