Smart Electric Drive 2010 Review - International

Smart Electric Drive

Smart has never really worked properly for Daimler. The German industrial powerhouse has invested more than 10 billion euros in it over the years and, at one stage, had three models wearing its badge. But that's been whittled back to just one now: the same short, squat, two-seat model it started with.

Benz has had its toes in the water with electric smarts since 2007, when it launched a limited program of 100 of them into special leasing deals in London.

This is the second generation and Daimler will build 1500 of the lithium-ion city cars to be leased around the world so that it can, as it admits, keep learning lessons for the full-production third generation in January, 2012.

Yet, even if it's a semi-prototype, this one is remarkably well developed and takes some valuable lessons from the London program. The first of these, surprisingly, is that nobody bothered to use or even seek out the much-politicised inner-city charging stations. They found that their smart drivers were pulling less than 50km a day in their cars, which was less than half the car's range, so they just charged them up at home each night.

This second-generation smart has just 20kW of power, though it can over-boost itself to 30kW for up to two minutes before it gets too hot and has to drop back down to 20kW again. If that seems a bit, well, paltry, electric car buffs will tell you the power is hardly significant at all, because they operate purely on torque (which is almost true). The beauty of this is that -- rather than waiting for 6000rpm for the maximum power to arrive -- the electric motors in the smart give their maximum torque from the instant you push the accelerator and that means the silent street machine can hit 60km/h in 6.5sec.

Plenty of cars these days are hitting 100km/h in about the same time, but think about your usual city traffic needs and that starts to seem plenty fast enough, especially given that there's no clutches to balance. You just push the throttle and it flies away.

To be honest, though, it seems like smart gives the 0-60km/h figure prominence because the acceleration tapers off markedly after that, though they insist that's by design and based on the London usage data from the first-generation cars. The difficulty comes not from straight-line burst from the line because, as they found in London, the step-off torque of the electric motor makes the thing unbeatable up to 20km/h or so, but not beyond that. Especially, we found, if you were forced to lift off the throttle at 40 or 50km/h. When that happened, we struggled to regain the pace of the cars around us.

It's heavy, too, with an additional 150kg of mass sitting low in the car as the battery pack fills up the old fuel tank's space. But the weight doesn't seem to have helped the choppiness of the ride much, even though it naturally compresses the diesel smart derived springs more than the original car.

It's still lumpy over square-edged surfaces and while it's more composed in hard cornering than the diesel, it never gives the idea that it's actually much fun. Except, of course, that you're fizzing around town emitting nothing and you're on high alert for errant pedestrians who haven't heard you coming. Which is just about all of them, though, unusually, the dogs have your approach covered.

So smart hasn't changed the springs and they haven't changed the brakes, either, insisting they do the job well enough. And they're right. In the urban conditions we encountered, it was never a problem.

Something else that was never a problem was charging it. It carries its own 3.3kW charger, so you just stop where you can reach a wall socket and go.While it takes eight hours to give it a 100 per cent charge, charging from less than 20 per cent is extremely bad for lithium-ion batteries, so isn't recommended. Neither, ironically, is charging more than 80 per cent, so that lops 40 per cent off the car's usual daily range...

Still, charging from 20 per cent to 80 per cent is a 3.5-hour exercise, even if it's drawing just 13 amps through a 220kW line.

But those are just numbers. As a driver, all you need to know is that you put it in the forward gear, then drive it like a normal smart and, apart from being stronger at low speed and quieter, that's it. Then, when you get home, you just pull out the cable and plug it in.

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