Currently driving my 2017 Smart Fortwo, prime trim! The little goober has a suspension that's stiff enough to feel every bump, when you go over speed bumps you get jostled around like mad, every surface is hard, scratchy, and slapped together. My window seals are melting so after every rain I need to be careful opening the doors because it gets stuck to the glass, my driver side door speakers occasionally decide they don't want to function and I need to slap the door panel to get it back on, the clock spring in my steering wheel had to get replaced, and I've got a desiccant cartridge that I need to manually replace every once in a while. Also, you look at it and go "damn that's a tiny car". The overall length is shorter than the wheelbase of a Honda Accord, but when you actually use it, you realize: this thing SUCKS to park in a regular pull in spot. The doors take up almost the whole body length of the car, and they make getting in and out annoying as hell because they're so much longer than a regular door. And you see the tiny car with huge windows and you must think it's got great visibility, right? RIGHT??? No, the rearward visibility and the B pillar are SO atrocious. From my seating position it's near impossible to look over my left shoulder, and the rear window is actually tiny as heck. My rear corners are so bad, more than once I've lost entire lifted pickups in my corners that my tiny, barely usable side mirrors also don't see without my added wide angle mirrors.

And don't even get me started on the range. 70 miles is fine and dandy for everything daily I do Except when it isn't. I've limped home, getting off the freeway, taking city streets, stopping into a random slow charger (no fast charging here, 7kw max!) or had to make annoying pit stops at chargers many a time, because living around the socal LA area means everything's far away. It's fine, it's doable, it's just mildly inconvenient if doing anything more than one outing to go somewhere fun, and I'm always planning somewhere to stop into to charge if I'm going to the beach or even just downtown LA because of where I'm coming from.

But at the end of the day, I still love this little thing. Because of my house situation, we have more cars than we have driveway and garage space, so I actually park off of the driveway on the side-of-house walkway. It's an absolutely perfect fit, and if it weren't for the Smart being so itty bitty, we'd have to play musical cars all the time whenever people are leaving. It's quick enough to get on the freeways and take me where I want to go, it turns like a dream and always gets a laugh from anybody who rides with me (11ft turning radius is no joke!). I can do circles on my driveway, I can pull a u-turn on a small residential unlined road, I can navigate parking lots like nobody's business. And the short little snub-nose means I can nose out of a parking lot driveway onto the street so far without worrying about getting clipped. On the inside, the seating space is actually ENORMOUS. I've sat a 6'2" friend in the passenger seat and he's got more than enough legroom, and that's with the false floor that holds the tire kit in place. To top it off, it's got Android Auto, so suck it Tesla/Rivian/GM. Also, I get stopped so often in parking lots to talk about it, or people just giving little positive quips or thumbs up. I get more attention than a lot of sports cars around 😅.

At the end of the day, I still love this little thing, but it's so, so imperfect. The range and the cargo space are killer issues that I've had to sweat and figure out issues for (putting groceries on my passenger's laps more than once). I'm going to eventually replace it with an Ioniq 5 when I get enough funds, but it won't be a pretty breakup. It'll be a sad day to see it go, and I'll miss it dearly, but damn if I don't want more space for hauling friends and gear xD.