2016 Smart Fortwo ( lifted smart car )

lifted smart car

What’s been stopping you from buying the Smart Fortwo, America? The lurch-prone gearbox? The woeful steering? That its seats are so closely spaced that you can smell what your passenger had for lunch? (And, quite possibly, for breakfast?)

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2016 Smart Fortwo
2016 Smart Fortwo
Better execution of a still dubious premise.

    Nov 2014 By MIKE DUFF

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First Drive Review
What’s been stopping you from buying the Smart Fortwo, America? The lurch-prone gearbox? The woeful steering? That its seats are so closely spaced that you can smell what your passenger had for lunch? (And, quite possibly, for breakfast?)
If so, we bring good news: Daimler has diligently addressed each and every one of these problems when engineering the third-generation Fortwo coming here in late 2015 as a 2016 model. Meaning that you’re all out of excuses and should head down to your local Smart dealership and join what’s certain to be a growing line outside.
Or maybe not. Because although Smart understandably highlights what makes the Fortwo better, we can’t really report any substantive changes to the fundamental proposition. Which, we’d respectfully suggest, might have been keeping more Americans from Smart ownership than any of the widely acknowledged niggles of the previous version.
 The driving experience is both familiar and better. The new Smart is a clear improvement over its predecessor by most driving measures, no more so than with the replacement of the old car’s woefully laggy automated manual gearbox. (For those who’ve never driven an original Smart, just know that you could speak entire phrases in the delay between ratios. Frequently these would be obscene phrases about the transmission.) Now Smart offers a choice of either a five-speed manual or a six-speed dual-clutch automatic. Daimler reckons the U.S. take will be about 80 percent DCT—a perfect inversion of the anticipated manual-to-auto split in Europe.
Both transmissions work well. The five-speed has a nice, light action, certainly once you’re acclimated to the clutch’s relatively sudden biting point. The pedals are well spaced for some heel-and-toe rev-matching, as well, although the turbo engine’s nonlinear response makes that harder than it should be. We were only allowed to drive a prototype version of the DCT—apparently it’s not yet as far advanced as the rest of the car—but it shifts cleanly when left to its own devices and quickly if you issue instructions by sliding the gear selector into its “manual” position. The lack of standard steering-wheel paddles is a tacit acknowledgement that this is a dual-clutch-as-automatic, though, rather than a proxy manual.  Praise falters when we get to the new engine. The U.S. will only be taking the more powerful 89-hp turbocharged version of the transverse three-cylinder engine, and this felt excessively laggy and gutless at lower revs. We also managed a run in the naturally aspirated 70-hp model, which, despite taking four seconds longer to get to 62 mph (14.4 seconds, per Smart), felt far smoother and barely slower at urban speeds. That one’s not coming our way, but slow-lane proponents can look forward to a new iteration of the full-electric version. It will follow sometime later, as will a cabriolet model.
The new Smart is as clever as its predecessor, a bit more comfortable, and built to a higher standard. It’s a likable city companion, but it still feels like the answer to a question that very few U.S. buyers will be asking anytime soon.