In the recent COAL, I mentioned the EPA ratings for the 2015 smart: 34 city, 38 highway, 36 combined. A few comments reported better real-world results were possible.
I had made no effort to check the gas mileage in ours, so I used it last week on a semi-typical day for me. I work from home 2-3 days a week, and make my rounds and “errands” the other days.
I went on 200 mile route (190, to be exact), which had me going by two office locations, checking on a tenant that I was going to have to evict (they were moved out), finding a new “empty nester house” my wife wanted me to scope out, going to a recreational gun range for a while, and getting the windows to the smart tinted.
This was a good test route for the gas mileage. I filled up at home and reset the trip odometer before I headed out. I was on two lane country roads,
City streets;
and Interstate as well. I didn’t purposely get the speedometer in the shots (I wish I had done so), but you can see I’m over 75mph here. In my driving, I kept up with traffic for the most part. I think this is a 65mph zone. It was hot and humid all day, and I had the A/C on as well.
I found the house for sale my wife wanted to check out. It’s in a “hip” neighborhood, and while I loved the house, I decided the location was a little too “hip” for us. The driveway was pretty tight; I’m not sure how you’d get any normal size car turned around back there.
I got lots of pointing and waving in this area from people walking and jogging by, so I guess the smart was deemed “hip” enough for the area. Or maybe they were laughing at it, not sure which.
So at the end of the day, I returned to the same gas station and even used the same pump, to maybe bolster the accuracy of our math. Filled it up until the pump shut off that morning, and did the same thing that evening. We covered 190.3 miles,
and used 4.796 gallons in the process. The gauge in the smart is a little optimistic; it holds 8 gallons and there are eight segments on the gauge. Seems like I should have been reading less than a half a tank.
Anyway, you do the math and this is what you get. Not bad for a mix of driving conditions, keeping up with traffic, and running the A/C full blast all day. I’ll check it on a similar route this Fall without the A/C.
The window tinting was pretty cool to watch, too. You enter the year, make and model in a computer and the film is cut to fit. The application process still takes a while; the whole job took about two hours. We did the “darkest legal” tint on the doors and rear hatch, and a clear UV blocking film on the windshield.
What’s everyone’s opinion on tints? I had never had tinted windows on anything, until I bought the used 2015 BMW 328i Gran Turismo I wrote up previously. It had a very dark tint when I bought it (too dark to be legal for my state, but it has passed inspection anyway) so it was already there. I couldn’t believe what a difference it made with the heat.
So, when I bought the Suburban, I went to a window tint guy who was a friend of a friend. The rear doors and cargo area were “limo tint” from the factory, but I had him tint the front doors the darkest legal for my state, which isn’t very dark. He also applied a clear UV blocking film to the inside of the windshield. It’s been great; this is my first full summer with it, and I don’t use vent visors or a windshield sun screen when parked.
It gets hot inside, yes, but not like you would expect, and less so than about any car I have had before. You can touch the steering wheel after it sits in the sun all day, and it cools down quickly (of course, GM’s are always good at that anyway).
The smart will really benefit from the tint, I think. It must have the highest ratio of glass to cubic volume of interior space, of about any car ever made. The A/C just can’t keep up on a 90+ degree day. With 90+% humidity. Which is about every summer day around these parts.
And now, Hurricane Laura’s remnants will be here by next weekend! Stay safe out there, everybody.
I don’t know about NC, but in Las Vegas, tint is practically mandatory – certainly if your car is parked outdoors any time during the day. An un-tinted car can hit 145F sitting in the sun, and automotive air conditioning has a tough time when you ask it for a 60 degree drop in temperature.
I’ve never quite grasped the dearth of solar-powered roofs that automatically powers a vent fan to lower the interior temp of stationary vehicles. Yeah, I think a few high-end cars still have them, but my favorite was the third generation Prius. It was a terrific feature that really aided keeping the temp down so the A/C didn’t have to initially work so hard but, for some reason, it was cancelled on subsequent versions.
In line with ratings, and no better (possibly slightly worse) than many of the current slew of normal gas-engine’d compact and midsize sedan offerings in real world driving. Unless you really need that tiny footprint for city parking, I still view these things as utterly pointless. As a suburban golf car bought for a firesale price… yeah I could see that use case scenario as well I suppose.
That 39 MPG is good, but not GREAT. You can probably get the same number or close to it, or maybe even beat it, with a recent Corolla or Fit, or those 90’s Geo Metros that get snapped up every time the price of gas spikes. All of those have a usable back seat and trunk/hatch.
But the Smart looks like it SHOULD get 65 MPG.
So why doesn’t it? Weight, in order to have a crash resistant passenger cell? Too much engine? What if it had a tiny little engine and they had reduced buyers’ performance expectations?
Aerodynamics. It’s a brick, but tipped up.
The longer the relative length of a body, the lower it’s aerodynamic CD will tend to be. That’s the reason big, long cars tend to have the best CD. Short, stubby and tall cars are intrinsically unaerodynamic.
Who cares? 39 mpg is good. The actual relative difference between 39 and 49 is surprisingly small (25%, because of the way we measure mileage. But the actual amounts of gas and $ at these levels are peanuts, especially with our low cost of fuels.
I’m wondering about the transmission’s part in the fuel mileage equation. I’ve always loved the Smart, probably would have owned one by now if they had given a manual transmission option on US cars. That ‘automated manual’ (because that’s what it really is) shifted horribly in automatic mode on the one I test drove to the point that you really need to shift it manually to get it to work right. And a two-pedal manual doesn’t really work with me.
Now, having owned a ’94 Geo Metro at one time, I have no doubt that you can get 50mpg from one of those. I used to all the time if I was willing to shift early and not try to drive it like a sports car (they did handle well). The reason it could do it is that it was a light tin box. Period. A Smart verges on limousine comfort compared to a Metro, and is a good indication of what expectations are for basic transport in our society today.
The automated manual is the most efficient transmission design with the lowest frictional losses of any “automatic” transmission. So no it has nothing to do with the transmission.
Thank you. Always wondered why the current love of automated manuals. The way you put it, they make sense. Efficiency over performance.
Well, the third generation Smart did have a true manual transmission option for the US market.
IIRC, one of the biggest gripes about the ForTwo was the poor fuel mileage for a vehicle so small. It was somewhat unfair since the aerodynamics of what is essentially a four-wheel telephone booth simply won’t allow it to go as far as one would think on a gallon of gas (particularly on the highway), no matter how small.
In the EU, this generation of smart could be had with an 800cc 3 cylinder diesel, rated by their EPA equivalent agency at 71mpg combined. Maybe someone reading this will have some real-world experience with one of those. It had less horsepower (53 versus 70) but more torque (96 versus 68 foot pounds).
Those EU numbers were notoriously optimistic. Around 50-60 mpg in reality.
The diesel was sold in Canada from 2004 to 2008, and there are still many of them around, especially in urban areas. As I remember the gas version could not pass some evaporative emission regulation, so they went with the diesel. When the new version came out in 2008, only the gas version was offered.
I’m given to driving strange cars, and we loved our Fortwo. That said, while every reviewer on Planet United States fixated on the “automated manual” causing the car to pitch and dive on every shift, we could feather the gas and get smooth shift. We did notice however that the suspension recreated the luxurious smoothness of a rigid axle Conestoga Wagon. It was pretty punishing. I should have kept it, though: I live in Naples, Italy now and everybody has one here, because the streets are microscopic. On top of which, Naples, which is a cool city in many, many ways, happens to have the world’s worst pavement.
You guys have those interesting pseudo-cars, lower powered and small but able to be driven by people as young as 15 or so and trading for quite little money, right? I coincidentally saw them in a TV show a while ago and they looked interesting for around town type of chores.
Another interesting tidbit: the 2015 smart coefficient of drag is 0.345. The late, departed Tahoe Hybrid with a deeper front air dam and a few other tweaks was (drum roll), 0.36.
That’s a bit of apples and oranges, as the coefficient of drag (CD) is only half the equation to determine total aerodynamic drag. Given the smart’s short body, 0.345 is actually quite good for its CD.
I understand the tint for keeping the interior from roasting during the day but side visibility is greatly reduced at night. Very dangerous for drivers and law enforcement when they approach. How cost prohibitive is it to produce auto changing side and rear glass using the technology used on personal eyewear?
I have found the legality of window tint to be more of a theoretical concept than an actual one. I have known people with some pretty dark tints on windows and have never heard of anyone getting into trouble over it.
I think in some states, they do check as part of the annual safety inspection. I don’t know how North Carolina works now, but 20 years ago when I lived there, inspections stations would check the darkness of any window tint. I remember a friend of mine moved to NC from Virginia with a dark-tinted Maxima, and had to have the windows re-tinted in order to register it in North Carolina, which was a pain.
Yes, I am in NC and aftermarket window tint is part of the inspection process, they hold a meter up to the glass. The darkest legal tint here, is really not very dark at all. But, as with the clear windshield film, the helpful UV blocking occurs without regard to the actual “color” of the tint.
I asked the window tint guy how people pass inspection in NC with the ultra dark tints; he said he has plenty of customers come back to have it removed for inspection, then reapplied afterwards. Crazy.
If your windows are laminated they probably already block UV.
At the risk of sounding political (which is not my intention), in Florida it’s often viewed as a “profiling tool”, as there are regulations, and if your vehicle (or perhaps its driver) fit certain “types”, the local constabulary might be more inclined to stop you to “check your tint”.
This is not something I’m intimately familiar with, but I’ve heard discussion of it among folks who have experience in this regard. On the flip side I’ve heard stories of people who’ve been stopped for a minor infraction and given a ticket for illegal tint rather than for a deserved moving violation, so I suppose a silly regulation can either be a win or a loss, depending.
The thing about a Smart ForTwo, or a Fiat 500, or any very small car (by American standards) is that they were not built for maximum fuel economy, but rather to optimize the smallest footprint possible to make them more friendly for European cities. Remember that a Smart can park two of them perpendicularly in a normal parallel parking space, and many European cities allowed this. They had to make the Smart car pass the “Moose Test” and other regulations to make them legal, and that added weight and complexity that ultimately affects fuel economy. It was made to be small, and that is antithetical to American ideas. We assume a small car to be thrifty and very fuel efficient, as we mostly cannot fathom any other reason to own one.
It is super fun to drive around town, and a lot of that is the ease of maneuvering and parking. My daughter just moved into her first apartment in San Francisco. She circles for 30 minutes trying to find parking for her small Audi A3, and keeps passing spots the smart would fit! Usually a little space between two driveways. She may well want to swap cars…..
Having a car shorter than any of the other cars is the way to go with urban parking. Not just for some short space between driveways either. If there’s a long stretch with no driveways cars of different sizes come and go and a space shorter than an A3 might crop up. There are a lot of cars a little shorter than an A3, and a lot of them park in San Francisco. A Fiat 500 is 59 inches shorter than an A3.
As Michael Allen noted, the Fiat 500 is almost 3 feet shorter than the A3 (not the 59 inches he noted), and is a bit more usable than the Smart, at least in my opinion. It has a back seat, although I have only had one person sit in my back seat, and then only for about 20 minutes. But there is a bit more room, regardless.
@JFrank “not built for maximum fuel economy, but rather to optimize the smallest footprint possible”
exactly. i live in nyc and now that the subway system appears to be headed to long term service cuts, i may actually buy a smart to commute within manhattan. it’s by far the best option for street parking. they have become quite common here.
I’ve got the bigger brother to this car a 2015 M-B B250. It has a 7 speed DCT and a 2.0 litre gas turbo. In light traffic on 2 lane highways it can hit 40 miles per U.S. gallon. Usually in the middle 30 range on the faster highways. The Smart will beat most of the competition on the city drives as you are accelerating far less weight around.
Had a small VW (Passat, maybe?) as a rental a couple of years ago. A tiny gasoline engine with a turbo. An easy 40 mpg plus, if you didn’t mind the inconsistent surging acceleration behavior. Over 50 mpg on a long, flat freeway at 70 mph and the a/c on. That’s with a back seat and a trunk. So call me unimpressed, except for the economy of packaging and parking.
Smart cars are neat but I’ve only driven my friends Electric Drive version. Unfortunately it arrived with big “E D” decals which got my friend no end of teasing, (and I’m not talking ‘Mr Ed’).
I think they’re a great urban runabout, but are specialized and limited in usefulness. Insurance and license are expensive in Ontario, so it’s difficult to justify so much expense for something so limited.
I have 3 smarts. 2008 passion 55 mpg yes all highway miles now car has 118000 and still going strong. I hit 3 big deeds and do very little jaunt. Clutch activator wad replaced at 80000 miles. 2nd one is a 2016 electric drive with 15000 miles and I get 125 per charge. 3rd 2016 prime bigger beaver I get 44 mpg. Now looking for the white with metallic orange strip.
Size, city driving, parking and decent stop and go traffic fuel mileage.
I put a couple hundred kilometers on a convertible model with the diesel engine, and the transmission made what would have otherwise been a mostly enjoyable experience decidedly unpleasant. It was frankly completely unacceptable unless you used the manual shift mode and carefully feathered the throttle while shifting. As much as I like both small and quirky cars, even the convertible option couldn’t make this vehicle desirable. To get the full convertible experience you had to put down the tiny top and then remove the sections of the roof that remained over each door. This meant messing with two finicky latches on each side and there was no convenient place to put the two surprisingly heavy pieces of the roof once removed. The diesel engine was okay I guess but the transmission was the worst I’ve ever experienced in any car. I’ve seen a few electric versions on the road and can’t help thinking it would make for a huge improvement.
39 is REALLY good. We bought a smart for the opposite of driving, which is of course parking. In San Francisco it was lifechanging. That said, with the hills of this town, our mpg was at best 23pmg. Overall, it got pre-lemon-lawed with cronic issues that I warned Mercedes/smart about. Ours was replaced but ultimately, we sold it for something that could handle a grandkid once in a while.
Fun fact: Our 70 year old, 6′ tall drag queen friend wanted a ride home from her show and asked if we had our car. Unaware that we’d bought a smart, we joked that we had a Town Car, which she was all for. We pulled up in the French supermini and she yelled, “That’s a CLOWN car not a TOWN car” but she wasn’t going to turn down a ride instead of a walk in heels. She fit in the “way back” of the smart for a highly unsafe, 2 block ride . The capacity for wigs, makeup and b.o. was impressive.