EV Smart outdoes combustion cousins

MONACO - The battery-powered Smart drives better than gasoline- or diesel-fuelled Smarts.

This is a first impression — burnished by the tiny two-seater's uncanny ability to skirt the many Bentleys and Ferraris clogging the traffic in this city state. Harbour to casino, only a scooter might be faster.

But the electric Smart excels by being quieter and more comfortable than the earlier models Canadians have come to know. Gone is the teeter-totter rocking set off by the automatic gearshift because the electric motor operates with a single gear. (Reverse, when engaged, reverses the motor's direction of rotation.)

It is less suited to highway driving with a top speed of 100 km/h. It's recast as a city car, unapologetically, albeit capable of humiliating said Ferraris and Bentleys for the first metre or two of acceleration from a standstill as 120 Newton metres (88.5 lb-ft) of torque drives the lightweight forward. (Before you're through the intersection, though, the electric Smart's progress slows: acceleration to 60 km/h is claimed to be 6.5 seconds, compared with 6.9 for the Brabus model I tested last year.

The 45 electric drive Smarts coming to Canada in the fourth quarter of 2010, are from an initial production run of 1,000 that began emerging from the factory in Hambach, France, in November.

Mercedes-Benz Canada has yet to decide how they'll be distributed, but in European countries they're leased for €700 (about $1,000) a month, with the car to be returned after four years. With volume production in 2012, they'll "become available to anyone interested," Mercedes-Benz says.

Range is 135 km. Plugging into a normal home electrical outlet overnight facilitates urban driving all day, at a cost of between €2 and €3 (less than $5); 220-volt outlets, like those used for washers and dryers, are required for normal charging time.

Cold weather operation is claimed to minus-20 Celsius. And Jochen Eck, in charge of testing, explained the Smart is pre-heated during the charging process. "Once the battery has absorbed 75 per cent of its charge, then the interior is heated or air-conditioned in the summer using the electricity from the grid, and the car can maintain that temperature with less than one kilowatt." The lithium ion battery has a capacity of 16.5 kwh.

Canadians will withhold the Great White North seal of approval until seeing for themselves, but Eck insisted that three winters of testing in the Alps made him confident that (1) interiors can be toasty and (2) range will not be greatly reduced by heating and defrosting requirements.