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The significance of where you’re going is less apparent if you don’t understand where you’ve come from, and when it comes to a brand like smart – which is comparatively quite young – there’s a surprising amount of history.
And that history definitely contrasts with where the brand is going.
smart started out as a joint venture between Mercedes-Benz and Swatch – yes, the Swiss watch brand.
The partnership is even hidden in the name, as smart is an acronym for Swatch, Mercedes, and ART. Launching with the diminutive Fortwo in 1998, the fresh-faced brand’s funky and tiny city cars quickly became part of the scenery in dense European cities.
The smart of today is dramatically different – corporate ownership is now shared between Mercedes-Benz and Chinese automaker Geely, with production moving to China and the products morphing from ultra-compact combustion-powered cars to entirely electric small SUVs.
smart’s colourful and vibrant persona (the smart #3’s colour palette encompasses 12 vivid hues!) remains intact, but the products are now wildly different and – most importantly – far more relevant to the average Aussie motorist.
To explore what that means, we’re going on a road trip that takes us from the old, toward the new – and we’re going to kick it off in the car that put smart on the map: the Fortwo.
It’s absolutely tiny, measuring just 2.5 metres long and 1.5 metres wide, and takes power from a teensy rear-mounted 0.6-litre three-cylinder engine. Cabin space? Enough for two adults and not much else, but on the flipside the Fortwo is so short you could park perpendicular to the kerb in a parallel parking spot without obstructing traffic.
The Fortwo’s design was the result of clever out-of-the-box thinking that endeared it to an urban audience, and the innovative thinking behind it is very much alive in smart’s new era.
Stepping out of the Fortwo and into the smart #1, the new entry model to the modern smart range, we find ourselves in bold new territory. As a small SUV that’s fully electric, the #1 dwarfs the old Fortwo with its 4.2 metre long and 1.8 metre wide footprint, along with its five-door, five-seat configuration.
But it’s not huge by modern standards – a Corolla is about 40cm longer overall, yet has less room in its back seat. The smart #1, meanwhile, has a surprising amount of rear seat leg room and head room, as well as a rear bench that can slide fore and aft if you need more luggage room.
That clever packaging comes courtesy of smart’s new vehicle architecture, which pushes the front and rear axles right to the extremities of the floorpan to move the mechanical stuff out of the way of the occupants.
Speaking of mechanical underpinnings, the smart range is built on the same platform that’s found beneath the Volvo EX30 – one of its chief rivals.
However, in Australia the smart and Volvo brands are very much different entities, with smart being distributed through the large Mercedes-Benz retailer LSH Auto in Australia.
smart is now a fully-electric brand, so long trips like the one we’re doing require a healthy range to get it done without range anxiety rearing its ugly head.
Happily, we’ve got 440km from the #1’s 66kWh battery, enough to handle a week’s worth of 40km workday commutes, with plenty of charge left over for the weekend. Charging time? smart claims it’ll go from 10 per cent to 80 per cent full in just half an hour on a 150kW DC fast charger. Not bad.
And the #1’s interior, besides being spacious for a vehicle of this size, is simply a great place to be.
The massive 13-inch screen is brimming with tech and features and responds quickly to touch inputs, and there’s a helpful self-parking feature in the Premium and Brabus grades as well. Cabin furnishings look and feel high-end, but above all else, though, it’s spacious for a small SUV – particularly in the back seat.
There’s another smart to look at, however. The #3. Lower-slung and with a fastback profile, the #3 is sleeker, slipperier, and, in the case of this Brabus-spec example here, is much, much faster.
The Brabus puts an additional motor on the front wheels, turning a reasonably zippy small SUV into a straight-line monster.
With 315kW and 543Nm from its dual motors, the #3 Brabus launches from zero to 100km/h in just 3.7 seconds, while its tauter suspension tune delivers a sportier ride and handling.
It might look like an urban SUV from the outside, but it performs like a supercar. It’s a different beast to the single-motor Pro+ and Premium grades, that’s for sure.
The #3 Brabus caps off the current smart range at $70,900, but prices open at a very reasonable $54,900 for the #1 Pro+. In the premium EV space that’s a sharp deal, and it’s helped by the fact that smart backs its cars with a five-year, 150,000km warranty, with the battery pack under warranty for eight years.
But the #1 and #3 are only the latest chapter in smart’s history. Soon, the company will introduce the #5, a mid-size SUV that’s set to bring a heap of innovation to one of Australia’s top-selling segments, and push the smart brand even further into a new era.
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