Guess Which?
by David Finlay (03 Dec 01)

I thought I was going to like it. Really I did. The concept seemed sensible, many of the ideas were cute, the engineering was bound to be excellent. I fully expected some joshing about it from The Lads, but I was prepared to join in the frivolity with good spirit.

But when the day came, and I found myself standing next to the smart & passion test car in the realisation that I would be driving nothing else for a week, something within me fell on its side. The concept still seemed sensible, the ideas remained cute, the engineering was indeed excellent. I just didn't want to be seen driving the thing.

Either you get the smart thing or you don't, and I very much didn't. Clearly I am not in touch with my inner child to the extent I had hoped. Or perhaps my sense of irony has limits that I have only just discovered.

It's a personal matter, of course. Some people absolutely love the smart. One friend in particular went absolutely gaga on hearing that I was driving one, and launched into a torrent along the lines of, "Ooh! I really want one of those. I'm trying to get my dad to buy me one. Do they come in pink? I want one in pink so it'll match my mobile phone." All of which made me realise that part of the reason I don't want a smart myself is that I am not an 18 year-old girl.

As you'll know by now, the smart is the Mercedes take on the city car concept. It has a quite extraordinary amount of interior room - I'm six foot three and didn't feel at all restricted while on board. In fact, interior room is almost all the smart does have. There's a bumper in front of your toes and another just behind your kidneys, which means the car takes up the bare minimum of road space and can (as happened on more than one occasion) be parked without difficulty in what appears to be a full-to-overflowing car park.

Middle Of The Range

Being of the passion variety, the test car was better equipped than the entry-level smart & pure, but less powerful than the smart & pulse. The three-cylinder 600cc engine makes as fine a sound as all other three-pots, and although its output of 54bhp sounds unimpressive, there is so little weight for it to push around that performance is pretty good. Other road users were visibly astonished to be overtaken with such ease by a car whose designers appeared to have started their drawings too close to the edge of the page.

This was out on the open road, of course. You might not think that this was ideal territory for the smart, but since I live ten miles from the nearest town I didn't have much option. In fact, although the brakes were usually pretty smelly by the end of a long run, I thought the car was generally every bit as effective in the country as in built-up areas.

Part of the reason for this is the gearbox, which is a six-speed manual with an automatic shift. You can let the car decide when to change, or you can control this yourself by prodding the lever (forwards for up, back for down), but the shift itself works the same way in each case. It's very much like the BMW sequential manual gearbox or Alfa Romeo Selespeed systems, and it shares the same basic problem with each of these, namely that the process of releasing the throttle, disengaging the clutch, swapping gears, engaging the clutch again and coming back on the throttle seems to take forever when you're not actually doing any of these things yourself.

This dead time, which is actually well under a second, can be quite disconcerting if you happen to be overtaking a lorry when it happens. And the change quality isn't all that great, though you can improve it by subtle movements on the loud pedal. This is a lot easier on the open road than it is between traffic lights, which is the main reason I didn't think the smart was as effective a city car as it might have been. A real automatic transmission would undoubtedly do the job far better.

Those Magazine Boy Racers Again

I thought the smart handled pretty well considering how short, narrow and tall it was, and I don't agree with the complaints from various magazine testers that it suffers from appalling understeer. First, I never found the need to drive it so hard that this became apparent (what on earth were they doing?) and second, understeer is the only form of on-the-limit handling failure I would be prepared to accept in a car like this.

Brief explanation: understeer means the front end is starting to slide. If it didn't slide it would lean instead, and you really don't want to assume great angles of lean in a car with so small a footprint. And if the back slid before the front, you'd be at constant risk of spinning, which is a concept I don't even want to think about when sitting in a smart.

The back end already has enough to do coping with the engine's 54bhp. This is not immediately obvious when you are driving, but the game is given away by the yellow dashboard light warning of traction control activity, which occurs so often (and in such apparently innocent circumstances) that I'm told smart owners refer to it as the pothole detector.

This is all quite worrying, because although the smart feels very solid, and shows little sign of wanting to fall off the road, it simply must be the case that it would be a deeply unfortunate car in which to have any kind of accident. There just isn't enough material between the occupants and the outside world. In this respect I would be very concerned about running a smart on a daily basis, particularly if it involved regular motoring outside 30mph limit areas.

Yet it's surprising how many of them you see on motorways. I was flabbergasted the first time I saw one cruising along the M6, but I can now see that it wouldn't be at all a bad long-distance car. In fact, a friend of mine who owns one of the early left-hand drive versions regularly travels the length of the country in it (though he admits to being careful in sidewinds). He's very happy with the car and was disappointed at, though understanding of, my own opinion that it is a brilliant execution of a horrible idea.

Price: £7995
Capacity: 599cc
Power: 54bhp
0-62mph: 17.5 seconds
Maximum speed: 85mph
Economy: 64.2mpg extra urban, 55.4mpg combined
CO2 emissions: 122g/km
Insurance: Group 2
Smart figures.

Second Opinion:
It isn't stressed often enough that the smart engines are all supercharged, which is why the cars go far faster than many people think possible. Yes, the Softouch transmission standard on this model, although highly ingenious, is laborious in action. It also marginally dulls the acceleration, increases the fuel consumption a little, and forces the CO2 emissions figure above the 118g/km possible with the Softip alternative. Smarts are carefully built, and the passion is well specified, while the fact that the fascia top with its ventilators and dinky little clock and rev counter looks rather like a pin table is just part of the car's charm. The steeply rising floor ahead of the passenger is a bit of a pest, though. You do have to be careful with the smart in windy conditions, and even with the electronic traction and stability control I'd drive this ultra-short wheelbase machine very cannily on slippery roads. Ross Finlay.

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