smart fortwo CDI Car Review

Facts At A Glance
Car: smart fortwo cdi
Prices: £9,227-£11,136 – on the road
Insurance Group: 2
Emissions: 89g/km
Performance: 0-60mph 17s / Max Speed 85mph [est]
Fuel Consumption: (urban) 83.1mpg / (extra urban) 88.3mpg / (combined) 85.6mpg
Safety: Twin front airbags, ABS, recessed wipers, ESP
Dimensions: Length/Width/Height 2695/1559/1542mm

A LITTLE DIESEL GOES A LONG WAY

Our Rating: 7.0 / 10

They don’t come much greener than Smart’s fortwo cdi city car. Steve Walker reports.

The fortwo is Smart’s view of what the modern city car should be all about. With the cdi engine installed, its one of the greenest cars it’s possible to buy and if you can do without rear seats and much of a boot, it’s a great, trendy way of getting about town. The fortwo is less at home on longer trips but can take to the motorway in an emergency.

As oil prices soar along with traffic congestion and air pollution, the small car concept that Smart launched on the world back in 1998 only looks more prescient. The original Smart car may have evolved into today’s Smart fortwo but the basic theory behind it has scarcely altered. What has changed is that Smart’s prediction that one day our cities and conurbations will be crawling with cars like this now looks likely to be realised. The Smart fortwo diesel certainly makes a compelling case for city dwellers to downsize.

It’s taken a while but motorists are gradually coming round to Smart’s way of thinking. Smart’s problem is that rival manufacturers are too. The fortwo once stood virtually alone as a city car that adhered strictly to the principles of compact size, light weight, maximum fuel economy and a trendy urban cool image. Nowadays, you can’t move at the motorshows for dinky vehicles from rival manufacturers trying to annex a slice of Smart’s territory. To date, however, the fortwo remains arguably the purest exponent of the genre. Whether its reluctance to bend its own rules will give it an edge in the small car future remains to be seen.

The diesel engine that features in the Smart fortwo cdi is certainly a tiddler. 54bhp from an engine of 799cc with two valves for each of its three cylinders leads one to expect two things; fiendishly thrifty fuel consumption and performance that’s relaxed to the point of being dead. Sure enough, the seventeen seconds it takes the diesel fortwo to cover 0-62mph sprint makes the word sprint look grossly inappropriate but remember the Smart’s unflinching focus on urban motoring. On the road in its metropolitan element, the increment it takes the fortwo cdi to reach motorway cruising speeds is an irrelevance. The 130Nm maximum torque that’s available between 2,000 and 2,500rpm is about what you’d expect from a 1.2-litre petrol engine. As a result, the Smart feels nippy when firing away from the lights and is relatively unfa

Smart’s designers did the decent thing and have done away with the sequential gearbox that was used in the original car, swapping its jerky six-gear set-up for a faster shifting, five-speed unit. The standard manual shift option gives decent control, letting you prod the lever to select gears yourself or flip the optional steering wheel paddles. Lift off the gas as you do this and it manages nicely enough but the softouch fully-automatic mode that features on the Passion models is preferable most of the time. This still isn’t one of the great sequential auto boxes.

There’s still a strong desire amongst city car buyers to have rear seats, even though they’re likely to be used less regularly than the Queen’s skateboard. A boot of more than 220-litres is another feature that the Smart deems unnecessary but the indications are that people like to have one all the same. You could also argue that the Smart is a little too small at under three meters in length and just over 1.5m wide. Still, it’s perfect in town even if outside the city limits the car is towered over by tailgating HGVs and buffeted by cross winds. Smart, of course, would counter that all of this frippery falls outside the fortwo’s remit of providing affordable, funky urban transport - something it does do exceedingly well.

Taken in isolation, the fortwo doesn’t look too different to its immediate predecessor but sit the two cars back to back and it’s easy to see where the changes were made. For a start, the smart has swelled by almost 20cm in length and 4.3cm in width but don’t worry, it’s still tiny. The track and the wheelbase have also been stretched but the majority of the length was imposed upon the company by pedestrian crash legislation. Inside, the fortwo now feels like part of the Mercedes-Benz family, rather than the scruffy stepchild that Smart’s prestigious parent company would rather forget. Space for the two occupants is surprisingly generous, the switchgear feels quite upmarket and build