A sad day has arrived: It’s time to say goodbye to our Smart ForTwo Electric Drive.
It’s small, it’s quirky, and it’s one of the more surprising cars we’ve had in the TFL fleet. Our tiny and extremely yellow Smart Electric Drive is on its way out. Tommy nicknamed this car “Tweety” — for obvious reasons — and it’s served the team well over these past several months as one of our main runabouts. Our loss is your gain, though, and one of you can actually own this little slice of electric history! (Quick update: We’ve gotten tons of inquiries and pending offers through our e-mail already, so please be patient and we will try to get back to you ASAP. I’ll also post an update through various channels when the car has actually been sold).
This 2015 Smart Electric Drive is one of the shorter long-term cars we’ve had in our fleet. Roman bought the car from an Oklahoma dealer back in May. Originally, we planned to (counterintuitively) turn it into an off-road juggernaut, but that never came to pass. Instead, we fitted a Steinbauer tuning module to the car and made it slightly faster zipping around traffic. Mind you, even with that power bump this car is no rocket ship. It manages about 94 horsepower and 142 lb-ft of torque, and a 0-60 time in the 9 second range. Still, for a relatively cheap urban runabout, that’s just about what you’d want for normal driving conditions. The range is about 60-70 miles as well, which makes it a solid choice for a short to mid-range commuter.
One of our biggest complaints
For being such a tiny little car, the Smart Electric Drive is pretty stout. There’s not much to go wrong mechanically with that EV drivetrain, but going that route does carry an inherent drawback. While modern electric cars are capable of Level 2 and even Level 3 DC fast charging, Tweety…isn’t. This car can only draw 3.3 kilowatts from our Level 2 charger, so it’s by no means a great road trip car. Journeys would take forever because the car just charges too slowly.
Over our six months of ownership, we also noticed the ride is pretty firm. That’s probably for the best in terms of zipping around cities, but it can be a bit punishing if you drive it on bad roads.
Still, it’s been a fun experience and we’re sad to see little Tweety go. But in perfect condition, would you go the cheap EV route for $7,900? Let us know what you think and stay tuned for more updates, including on our latest purchase.
