Car Review: Smart ForFour ED

A bright spark...

(Smart)

I’ve completed quite a few weeks now in my varied adventures in pure electric cars (so not hybrids that also have a diesel or petrol engine). I can report that I have just about been cured of the usual complaint of the electrolyte neophyte – “range anxiety”. This is for a number of reasons. First, electric cars have vastly wider ranges than they had when they first made an appearance on the market a decade or two ago (that was the pioneering, if fragile, Reva G-Wiz, by the way).

One of the latest entrants to the scene is the Smart ForFour Electric Drive, will go for about 100 miles before it needs a top-up, which should be plenty enough for most usage, including commutes. Second, the number of public charging points is growing, and is in any case much larger than drivers of conventional cars assume, simply because they tend to overlook them, tucked away as they are in the corners of car parks. Third, and most important, electric cars nowadays have “brains” that can take all the available data – principally your driving style – and accurately make a rolling dynamic prediction to within a mile or two of exactly what range you have within your reach, all in real time and displayed on the instruments ahead of you. Thus, I have not yet found myself running out of fuel, which tends to build confidence. I’d have no excuse.

Intelligent computer gives you an accurate, updated mileage range depending on your driving style (Smart)

The Smart ForFour is a charming car, though I have found its internal combustion-engined versions to have their issues in the past. In pure electric form it is actually superior, combining the usual compact five-door package for people and city-friendly ways (it has an impressive tight turning circle), with those very modest running costs. Practically it would cost maybe £1 or so to “fill up” the batteries, which makes the ForFour twice as cheap to run even than its petrol engine sibling, especially if you remember that servicing and maintenance of electric cars is much cheaper than that of more mechanical complex conventional vehicles – simply because there are far fewer moving parts. So far from being novel or untried, in fact, electric motors and batteries have been around for just as long as the internal combustion engine, and lithium-ion batteries, basically the type found in mobile phones and laptops, are both reliable and being developed at an astonishing rate.

In the case of this Smart, you can charge your car at home using a three-pin plug from the mains just as you might plug in a kettle or table lamp – but you have to make sure that you select the correct setting on the charging lead, otherwise you’ll blow the fuse, with possibly expensive results. It takes about 8 hours to charge it fully, I found, in this way. Far better, as most owners do, to fit a special charging point on the wall outside, assuming you have access to off-street parking, which means safe and rapid (three times faster than the domestic socket) faster charging (From £279, including a £500 government grant). Otherwise you can fill up at, say a supermarket or by taking a break on a motorway run. Depending on the weather and how run-down the battery is this can take anything from 30 minutes to a couple of hours. Why? The tricky bit is where you need, say, a 90 or 100 per cent charge to get you to your destination, but the battery is on 60 or 70 per cent charge. This is because fast charging at a motorway charging point only works to move the charge to 80 per cent of battery capacity; beyond that the charging only takes place at a trickle rate, so as to protect the battery from a shock, so to speak. I used the Ecotricity charging points quite a lot, which I found to be safe and reliable, but they do have a minimum charge of £3, so you have to make sure that you’re using them in the right sort of ways, or else that minimum fee pushes your overheads up considerably. (If you switch your domestic energy use to them then they waive the charge).

Ecotricity charging points are safe and reliable (The Independent)

The Smart, like all electric cars, has plenty of torque, which means a very sprightly performance from rest, but one that runs out of oomph at around 30mph; indeed the ForFour is limited to an 80mph top speed by the manufacturer to protect the range available to drivers (ie it could go faster if you wanted, but you wouldn’t do so for very long). In a trial and error sort of way I reckoned somewhere around 47mph is the optimum sort of speed, allowing for the fact you won’t want to hold up the other traffic too badly and get to where you’re going this year.

There are, I admit, some extremely economical and lively rivals to the Smart ForFour Electric at its list price of £16,915 (which includes a government grant of £4,500), and indeed much less expensive, such as my current favourite economy small car the Suzuki Ignis. Unless you really care about the planet, are prepared to take a very long-term view of your “investment” (hard when the technology is moving on so fast) or spend an awful lot of mileage on short-to-medium trips, then alternatives as varied as the Ford Fiesta, Dacia Duster, Mini or Citroen C4 Cactus offer a good deal more for the money.

The ForFour is twice as cheap to run even than its petrol engine sibling (The Independent)

The Smart is, though, reasonably well equipped and I liked the two-tone green-and-white colour scheme on my test example, complete with electric power decals spotted around the bodywork. As with all Smarts it is well made, stylish and uses the sort of quality materials you might expect from Mercedes-Benz, which is the parent of the Smart brand. So you get a rear parking camera, easy to use sat nav linked to the fuel range calculator (another reason why you shouldn’t run out of battery power), and even artificial engine sound when the vehicle is moving at low speeds to make its presence known to pedestrians and other road users (something I suspect will be made mandatory in due course).

The spec

Smart ForFour Electric Drive

Price: £16,915 (incl £5,000 govt grant)

Motor: 17.6Kwh Electric; 1-sp auto

Power output (bhp): 80

Battery capacity: 27kWh

Top speed (mph): 50

0-60mp (seconds):  12.7

Fuel economy (mpg): n/a

Range: 96 miles

CO2 emissions (g/km):  0

Maybe the most significant factor in the electric car revolution for some people will prove to be their virtually silent and clean running. Now may be the time to buy a home next to a busy A-road or not far from a motorway, hitherto priced down on the grounds of noise and pollution. Anyone living on, say, the A406 (London’s North Circular), the A14 in Cambridgeshire or the A556 in Cheshire ought to find themselves the beneficiary of a great boost in their property values in due course. All we need now is some electric airliners and all that fuss about Heathrow would be gone. Well, we can all dream.