Smart fortwo Range Car Review

Facts At A Glance
Car: smart fortwo range
Prices: £9,227-£16,026 – on the road INSURANCE GROUPS: 1-6
Emissions: 88-124g/km
Performance: [71bhp] 0-60mph 13.3s / Max Speed 90mph
Fuel Consumption: [71bhp] (urban) 57.6mpg / (extra urban) 72.4mpg / (combined) 65.7mpg
Safety: Twin front airbags, ABS, recessed wipers, ESP
Dimensions: Length/Width/Height 2695/1559/1542mm

WORK SMARTER NOT HARDER

Our Rating: 6.4 / 10

Does the second generation smart fortwo have a place in today’s citycar market? Jonathan Crouch decides

The smart fortwo has much tougher citycar competition to face in second generation guise but it still has its place for customers who only need two seats and want miniscule running costs in a tiny, fashionable package.

The smart story is a tale of two halves. The brand was originally conceived as a collaboration between watchmaker Swatch and Mercedes-Benz and it brought us one of the most curious and cleverest cars of the last century when what is now known as the smart fortwo debuted in 1998. Sceptics doubted that many urban customers would buy such a tiny, slow and odd-looking little car when for much the same money, they could have a more conventional supermini. They were wrong and the first generation car shifted over 770,000 units.

Sadly for smart, those same customers were largely less interested when the brand tried to bring them larger and faster cars – the forfour family hatchback, the roadster and the stillborn formore SUV. Nor indeed were many other buyers. By the time that management realised their mistake, the brand had haemorrhaged billions of euros. Time for a rethink. All other model lines were axed, the workforce was halved and a crack team from Mercedes was brought in to focus on the car people wanted, the car smart does best. The result is a second generation fortwo model so much improved even the Americans now want it.

Criticising the smart for feeling a little out of its depth in the cut and thrust of motorway traffic is a little like moaning that a Hummer feels rather clumsy around town. As before, this is a car designed primarily for urban use, where it feels very much at home, enabling its owners to snatch parking spaces that other citycar drivers couldn’t even look at: how many other urban runabouts can you leave face-on to the kerb for example? Just as impressive is its astonishingly tight 8.75m turning circle – that’s just three and a half turns lock to lock.

Yet this car must also be able to undertake longer town to town journeys and it was here that the first generation model always let itself down, courtesy of a wheezy 0.7-litre engine, a hateful, jerky semi-automatic gearbox, a bumpy ride and vague steering. The engine issue wasn’t too difficult t

You can opt for gearchange paddles behind the wheel for those times when you come over all sporty round the one-way system, though that’s not something likely to often happen to owners of the rather feeble entry-level 61bhp petrol model which really is for town transport only. If exclusively urban use is what you want, you’re probably better off going for the 54bhp cdi diesel version, billed as the ‘world’s most economical production car’.

British buyers understandably prefer to limit their interest mainly to the 71bhp and turbocharged 84bhp versions of the same engine and a few even go as far as trying the 98bhp BRABUS model, sporty in look but still resolutely smart in feel. The improvements to the ride and the quicker, sharper steering now mean that you won’t feel too bad about attempting a longer journey in a fortwo these days and although the top speed in most versions is limited to 90mph, the pokier models get there surprisingly quickly.

As ever, there’s a bodystyle choice of either this hard-topped coupe or the cheeky cabriolet with its electrically-retracting fabric roof and removable roof bars. Both have grown a bit - to all of 2,695mm long – thanks to the need for more cabin and luggage space as well as the demands of fresh pedestrian crash legislation. Still, this remains the smallest production car you can buy. By comparison, a conventional citycar like, say, a Peugeot 107, is 3410mm long, though unlike the smart, it can offer a set of rear seats.

Somewhat unusually, the fortwo’s passenger seat is mounted 15cm further back than that of the driver so that shoulder room can be maximised, something further helped by the 4.3cm increase in width allowing for an additional 3cm of elbow room compared to the old car. Luggage space is still tiny of course but the increase from 150 to 220 litres over the MK1 model is more than you get in a MINI without folding the seats. In theory, there’s up to 340 litres if you stack right up to the roof. The two-piece tailg