Long-term review: Smart ForTwo

It has a lot more rivals than it once did – so is the Smart still as relevant as ever?

1/5

5 October 2016

The city car market has come a long way since the first Smart arrived in the world. But here we are with the third-generation version of this iconic little vehicle, still doing the same things it’s always done so well – looking cute, turning on a sixpence and being able to slot into parking spaces that barely exist.

But is the Smart still relevant today? To try and answer that, we’ve just brought one in on long-term test.

Ours is the more powerful 89bhp model, because even city dwellers need to go on the motorway sometimes. If, like us, you hated the old model’s jerky auto box, you might well want to go for the simple manual option, but in the interests of science we’ve got the new six-speed dual-clutcher instead. It should be a lot better than the old unit.

Our ForTwo is in Prime trim, which lists at £12,415 on the road and comes with things like cruise, air-con and seat warmers. On top of that, it has another £845’s worth of Premium pack, so we also get to enjoy reverse assist, sat-nav, Bluetooth and Android phone pairing.

Not that ‘enjoy’ is the right word for the parking sensors, because they’re too keen. We ended up switching them off, and having done that we found it easier to slide the ForTwo into small spaces. Obviously, parking it at right angles to everyone else is a unique joy, too.

So it’s well equipped, and in general our first impressions are that the Smart feels pretty nice inside. It has decent materials, a cheerfully quirky design and, up top, a huge sunroof – which makes it feel even more spacious than it really is.

And it really is spacious. Much more so than you’d believe from the outside, and with more width than Smarts of old this model makes it easier than ever for two people to share the cabin.

So it’s still doing the right things, and it’s still making us smile for the same reasons. Is that enough to make it still relevant? Not on its own, maybe – but for this long-term test, it’s a good start.

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Long-term review: Smart ForTwo

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