Smart Electric Drive 2017 Review - International

Smart electric drive     
International launch
Miami, USA

It won’t be cheap – and it's unlikely to be sold in this generation Down Under -- but battery-electric power makes perfect sense on the smart fortwo, which is not on sale in Australia, especially if you want to use it exclusively on city streets, where a real-world 100km of range is less important than a two-and-a-half hour recharge time. It rides a bit better than standard, loses nothing in practicality or ease of parking and does a lot of things well.

It’s hard to look towards the horizon of the automotive industry and not see the growth in the height of the tsunami of battery-electric cars about to swamp the world’s cities.

There are companies already selling electric cars, but they’re either dabbling on the side to quietly, inexpensively validating their development and production while their cash cows continue to burn fossil fuels, or they’re building EVs in numbers so tiny they can’t disrupt anything other than Silicon Valley wallets.

The most likely time frame for this building wave to finally crash to shore is 2020 or 2021, when the EU’s emissions laws become so tight that they make emissions engineers get lip wobble.

Smart is getting out ahead of this curve. Well, it is getting out ahead of this curve again...
It’s getting out ahead with a car that is narrow-mindedly focused on life in cities, which should be no surprise, really, given that it’s pretty much what the petrol-powered versions do, too.

We tested the smart electric drive in and around Miami, and there’s good and bad in that. Miami isn’t known for its hills and mountains and the highest anybody is likely to climb is to the top of a bridge crossing one of its dozens of waterways.

On the other side, parking is limited, traffic is dense and the traffic lights seem haphazardly coordinated. Other than topography, it’s not a bad test site for electric cars.

It helps that the smart is just about the lightest electric car on sale today, at just over 1000kg, so there isn’t much to move around. What there is moves around pretty well, too.

Electric cars give their best torque outputs from zero rpm, rather than waiting for the tacho needle to climb up to 2000rpm or 3000rpm. That doesn’t help the smart to punch off the line, though.

Smart claims it gets to 60km/h in 4.9 seconds or 11.5 seconds to 100km/h, but it can feel a little laggardly until it gets to about 25km/h, when it takes a marked leap in enthusiasm and fairly jumps into gaps and dives into traffic with proper enthusiasm.

It’s also calm, with a bit of electric-motor whine under brakes as it regenerates electricity for the battery to use later on, and little noise of any kind at city speeds.

This is the fourth-generation battery-electric vehicle (BEV) from smart, and it will make an awful lot of sense for people who don’t leave the cityscape too often, because it’s realistically the first mainstream BEV it has ever had.

That’s because it’s going on sale in Europe at €21,940, before subsidies in whatever market it’s sold in. No smart has ever been cheap compared to its rivals and, fortunately for smart, there really aren’t any rivals for the 2.69-metre fortwo package, combining a premium image with terrific tight-street practicality.

It will also install the same battery pack and motor in three smarts (the fortwo, the forfour and the fortwo cabrio), even though the larger four-door has the size to take a bigger battery for even more range. Smart has taken a price-point decision that this much range is enough for a city car.

At its heart, the fortwo electric drive is powered by a separately excited three-phase synchronous motor, delivering 60kW of power and 160Nm of torque. It doesn’t sound much, but the torque is instant and the car is small...

Like the three-cylinder petrol fortwo, the motor sits over the de Dion rear axle, but there is no dual-clutch transmission. That’s been thrown out in favour of a single gear ratio. Whenever you select reverse, the smarts simply runs the electric motor backwards. It’s the same setup Renault uses in the Twingo, which is the smart’s platform partner.

The motor’s rotor is magnetized whenever current flows, with the energy flow from the high-voltage, lithium-ion battery governed by (what used to be called) the ECU that also controls the entire drive system.

A 17.6kWh battery pack sits beneath the seats, combining 96 flat lithium-ion cells and its output is guaranteed for eight-years and 100,000km. It’s powerful enough to stretch the Gen III smart electric drive’s range from 130km out to 160km.

This all sits inside a high-strength steel birdcage that’s an integral part of the smart’s chassis package and none of it does a thing to compromise its 6.95-metre turning circle.

The cars will retain the standard clever features from existing smarts, including a 6.95-metre kerb-to-kerb turning circle, and its on-board charger halves the recharge time of the Gen III to two-and-a-half hours in Great Britain and the US.

There will be a 22kW fast charger available from next year for Western Europe, allowing the cars to utilize three-phase power to cram an 80-percent charge into the battery in just 45 minutes.

Another tweak for keeping the BEV smarts moving is an anticipatory radar-based energy recuperation system to minimize wasted braking energy by harvesting as much energy as possible.

Besides a softer throttle response and a lower top speed, the smart’s more frugal ECO mode also gives up five different rates of recuperation urgency, converting kinetic energy into electrical energy. Its radar monitors the surrounding traffic and lets the car coast if there’s no traffic, then uses the electric motor as a generator to harvest energy depending on how quickly the car needs to wash off speed.

This clever system wasn’t available to test in Miami, though. Instead, we got raw smart driving, and were forced to do all the thinking by ourselves.

The single-speed gearbox strategy is both good and bad. It’s good in that it saves weight and cost, and there is no time lost and no jolts or jerks on any gearshifts, because it doesn’t change gears (unless you count reverse). On the downside, it’s this tall single-cog strategy that causes the smart to be less than blistering to 25km/h.

After that, it surges forward cleanly and its throttle response is demonstrably better than the three-pot’s reactions. Push the handling envelope with real vigour and the ESC light will get busy enough to drain the battery on its own, but while it can feel nervous changing direction quickly, it never let go on our test.

The fortwo’s cabin quality leapt forward in this generation, and the electric drive benefits from that, too, with nicer plastics, less surfaces with hard, brittle feel and more oddments space in accessible places, a seven-inch multimedia touchscreen, and the car is 110mm wider than the Gen III.

There’s a noise generator up front in the grille for pedestrians, which can be a bit annoying but can be turned off by the driver.

Other interesting cabin stuff includes the ability pre-set the climate control’s temperature while the car is still attached to the charging station, and that can be adjusted via a smartphone app, along with two preset departure times. Useful in Miami.

In truth, we were prepared for this to go either way, but it turns out the electric drive is the most convincing of all the Gen IV smarts. It’s just cost that’s a concern, because it adds a lot, loses nothing practical and costs little, in time or money, to recharge.

2017 smart electric drive pricing and specifications:
Price: TBC
Engine: Separately excited three-phase synchronous electric motor
Output: 60kW/160Nm
Transmission: One-speed automatic
Range: 160km
Recharge: 2.5 hours
Safety rating: TBA