Smart Fortwo 2015 Review - International

smart fortwo

Launch Review
Barcelona, Spain

After two generations, there is still nothing else out there quite like the smart fortwo. There has been one serious attempt at reaching down to the smart, but Toyota’s iQ has come and, defeated, gone again.

So it all leaves the third generation exactly where the first one was: standing alone and strewn across the strangest, the most unlikely and sometimes the most impolite of parking spots around the world’s cities – and those cities have had population growth of more than 10 per cent since the first fortwo arrived.

The trouble for Australians is that while our cities have become demonstrably busier, Benz Oz is trying to sell smart HQ on its indifference to the city-car if it's no cheaper than the current generation.

The smart fortwo sells for more in Australia than a collection of four-seaters and it never really found a place in Australian hearts after being launched in 2003. To the end of October this year, just 99 smarts had been delivered in Australia -- down from the almost equally paltry 107 last year and well down on 2005’s (modest) record of 799.

The last of the current-generation smart fortwos are (not) selling in Australia for $18,990 drive-away, but Mercedes-Benz Australia believes that price has to drop by at least 10 per cent for the new model to have a chance here.

“We have to make the decision by the end of this year,” Mercedes-Benz Australia communications head David McCarthy told motoring.com.au. "We want it but we have to make the business case work and we are in robust discussions.”

It’s not just the smart, but the entire genre that Australians have ignored, which is why Renault chose not to bring the new fortwo’s sister car, the Twingo, to Australia and why Volkswagen pulled its World Car of the Year-winning up! out of the market, too.

So this is the maybe-maybe not road test. Still, most people bought their smarts because of their ability to turn on a pebble (which has been improved here), park on a manhole cover (again, improved) and basically behave as a glorified form of personal public transport.

For all its flaws over the years, the core has remained and the core has been improved in this generation. Most of the last generation’s flaws have been addressed, too, but some curious new ones have been added.

The base engine has been significantly reworked, with a slightly larger bore and a slightly shorter stroke, but exactly the same 999cc capacity from its three cylinders and exactly the same power of 52kW.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the shorter stroke, it loses a Newton-metre to deliver 91Nm, but it does so some 1150rpm earlier in the rev range than the current car for increased practicality, while the power peak climbs 200 revs north to peak at 6000.

It’s not the most technically sparkling powertrain, though, lacking direct fuel-injection (which would have added hundreds of dollars to the price) and the only variable thing on it is the inlet timing.

The version smart will talk most about (but sell the fewest of) will be the 66kW version. Smaller (at 898cc) than the 52kW motor, it picks up a turbocharger to gain 4kW over the existing range-topper. It also gains in torque, with the peak lifting to 135Nm (+15Nm) at 2500rpm, which is 750rpm earlier in the rev range.

It’s a far stronger engine than the base version, getting to 100km/h in 10.4 seconds and on to a 155km/h top speed. The 52kW version, on the other hand, is actually more than a second slower to 100km/h (14.4 seconds) than the model it replaces.

It makes up for this with economy, posting an NEDC figure of 4.1L/100km to slip comfortably beneath the 100g/km barrier, posting 93g/km for CO2. The stronger engine is also on the right side of the wall, with 97g/km and 4.2L/100km. Both cars are more than half a litre better per 100km than the ones they replace.

The awesome news for anybody who ever owned, borrowed, tested or passengered in a fortwo is that the horrid self-shifting sequential gearbox is no more. There is an old-school five-speed manual gearbox and, while shifting your own gears goes against the ethos of making city life easier, it’s a whole lot nicer than having your head jerked back and forward at random and suddenly finding three-second gaps in performance just when you were trying to plug a traffic gap.

There’s also a six-speed dual-clutch transmission on the way, which delivers the absolute pinnacle of smart behaviour, but it won’t even be on sale in Europe until the middle of 2015.

Everything is either new or refreshed (which is a lot more than smart did with the Gen II version), from its revised de Dion rear suspension to the front subframe that directs crash energy up in the Tridion safety cell.

It’s the same length as the old one (2695mm), which means it should park just as well, but it’s wider (up 104mm to 1663mm) and higher (at 1555mm, it’s plus 13mm) and the 1873mm wheelbase is a scant 6mm longer, too.

To counter that, there has been a fair bit of jiggery poke going on in the steering system and it now turns around in an incredible 6.95 metres to the kerb, which cuts 1.8 metres off the old car’s diameter. It’s just 7.3 metres wall-to-wall, for those who live in narrow streets lined with buildings.

Idle-stop is standard in both models but, being a manual, they both need to be popped into neutral, with the clutch pedal let up, before they’ll do it.

The base model is the gruffer of the two when it starts, but it’s quite a bit smoother than the current car. While the numbers suggest it isn’t a flyer, it’s usually fine in city traffic. Usually. There are times when it just can’t muster the urgency to slide into gaps, but it usually feels nicely linear in its delivery and the sound levels never trend into ugly territory.

The three-pot layout has its fans, largely because the engine note and feel has some character that four-cylinder motors rarely match and that trend continues here. It’s a deep-sounding little thing that wants to rev, even if the city traffic rarely allows it to.

The turbo motor, on the other hand, doesn’t need revs to get going. Well, it needs some, which is its only real issue. It sounds just as gruff, though a bit better muffled, than the cheaper version, and it seems that its vibrations are better damped, too.

At issue, though, is its sudden change of character as the tacho needle swings beyond 1900-2000rpm. If you are driving around town on a steady throttle and stay in either second or third gear, the car accelerates in a calm, linear way until the turbo kicks hard.

When that happens, it surges forward urgently in a way that’s at best inconvenient and makes it hard to be smooth on either the throttle or through the gearshifts. At worst, it could see the inattentive streaking forward into situations they don’t expect to be in.

The reason, smart engineer Christoph Schulenburg admitted, is that the turbocharger hardware itself is actually a little bit too big.

“There aren’t many companies making turbochargers for engine capacities this small,” he said. “Ideally, we would use a smaller turbo, but there isn’t one out there.

“This (the power delivery) isn’t optimised yet and it will be better before it launches,” he assured.

The gear shifts themselves aren’t special, with an odd linkage arrangement leading to some jerks and baulks and second attempts, but the pedal layout is terrific and the weighting is light but still delivers enough feel to be intuitive.

The real secret to the new smart’s around-town handling performance, though, isn’t its powertrain. It’s the ride and handling.

Gone is the jerky vertical movement over bumps and the severe fore-aft pitch and squat. It’s replaced by a much more composed offering, absorbing bumps with a composure that belies its wheelbase and slotting through sudden direction changes without the old car’s awkward up-over-across-down feeling at the back-end.

Part of the reason is the new steering, part of it is all-new suspension geometry and damping, and the sneaky bit is that smart has lifted the aspect ratio of the rubber. Instead of riding on 175/55 R15s up front, it now uses narrow-but-taller 165/65 R15s and in place of the 195/50 R15 rear tyres, there is now a pair of 185/60 R15 tyres. They’re letting the rubber do more of the bump work for them.

You don’t get any wind noise until the car is spinning up at around 120km/h (which, let’s face it, isn’t what it’s for) and the roll centre feels a lot lower than it did, making the entire package feel not just more comfortable over bumps, but more secure around corners, too.

There is standard skid control, of course, but also it has a forward-facing camera to add lane-departure warning, a collision warning and crosswind stabilisation to the electronic safety mix, along with cruise control and a speed limiter.

Parking is even easier than before, because you can crank harder on the steering wheel and it will deliver more steering angle. The ability the thing has to flit itself into gaps is almost unimaginable thanks to steering wheels that can turn 45 degrees.

Basically, if it’s as long as the smart, you can pretty much get the smart into it. And if you can’t, you can just park it sideways. It all makes the smart’s rear-engine philosophy seem like the only natural way to go.

And, if other people don’t park as well as you do, there are always the robust plastic panels for the doors and the front and rear sections.

The interior feels larger than before, mostly because it is. They’ve made more length out of the same exterior space, but it does even more to maximise the advantages of the extra width. Two full-sized adults can now sit comfortably side-by-side in the fortwo without touching, and there is a surprising amount of headroom, too, even though it runs a high driving position.

There is a bit more luggage space (up to 260 litres, though you can stack it to 350 litres if you want to fill it to the roofline), it retains the horizontally-split tailgate and there are more places to leave things around the car. Two cupholders sit ahead of the gear lever, while there are large pockets in the doors and a comfortable range of seat adjustments, too.

It’s not without its issues, though. The large chunk of plastic demanded by the forward-facing camera blocks the windscreen above the rear-view mirror, which also blocked the Barcelona traffic lights whenever we were in the first three rows of traffic. There is also an odd blind spot where the passenger seat meets the rear pillar.

LED daytime running lights are standard, as are cruise control, a speed limiter, electric windows, a 3.5-inch TFT screen in the instrument cluster and active seat belt tensioners.

There are three “packages” with the fortwo (though it’s a bit pointless explaining the differences until MB-Oz commits to the car), running up to 16-inch wheels and tyres, a multi-function steering wheel, a JBL sound system with a 240-Watt amplifier, a 7.0-inch touch-screen multi-media display and an app that allows a smartphone to be plugged directly into the car’s systems.