I'm following Willys advice to post my woes in the relevant Forum. I have a 2005 Smart ForTwo that I bought new. It has about 85K on the dial. Last week on the way to the hardware store I did a too-quick right turn. The car went about 100 feet and stopped, still running. I could turn it off and restart it. It would not go into forward or reverse. There was a very faint clunking noise/vibration when I tried. Each time that I tried to put it into gear I got three horizontal, dashed lines on the gearshift indicator display. I was about 300 yards away from my regular mechanic's garage (right beside the hardware store!). I called the CAA to get it towed to the shop. 45 minutes later the tow-truck arrived, the driver started it, put it into gear and forward it went. I drove to the shop with the tow-truck following behind. The shop read the codes and told me there was some kind of blockage in the transmission. It sounded to me like the car was pooched, so I carefully dove it home, without incident. I cancelled the liability insurance, but thought I should know what was wrong with it before putting it up for sale.
I did a google search, found you guys, became a member after several abortive attempts to authenticate my email, I introduced myself, was warmly welcomed and given a gentile nudge in the right direction (I hope). I looked through the archives here, paid my annual fee to evolution.co.uk, successfully authenticated my email there and now hope for the best. I believe that, in a way not surprisingly, the solution is that when in doubt, reboot. I will see if my usual grease monkeys have an MB Star to reintroduce the transmission to the car so that it can once again be a "smart" car and let you know how it turns out. The MB Star device is costly. Is it something that I will need down the road? I had wanted this to be my forever car, and it was doing pretty well on that score.
