From the outside the Smart EV looks identical to any other Smart Fortwo only the cable and three-pin plug where a petrol cap should be give it away. What Smart aspires to with the EV (which stands for electric vehicle) is a driving experience and safety record akin to a conventional petrol motor. The car has a range of about 70 miles between charges and a top speed of 70mph.
It is produced in collaboration with Zytek, a technology firm based in Lichfield, Staffordshire, which started work on the EV in 1996, back when Arnold Schwarzenegger was still driving Hummers and toting machineguns. Zytek is building 100 EVs for a pilot lease programme that will begin later this year and Smart predicts a version of the car will go on sale to the general public within five years . The EV s abilities put it in a different league to most electric vehicles on sale in Britain today, some of which can only loosely be termed cars.
The most popular one to date is the Reva G-Wiz, which has a top speed of 45mph and a range of 40-50 miles. Built in Bangalore, India, it is officially a quadracycle and feels like one. It might be fine for pootling around west London and avoiding the congestion charge, but in unofficial crash tests the G-Wiz failed spectacularly.
The EV we tested was still experiencing a few teething troubles: there was a slight lag on the throttle and the virtually silent driving experience was disrupted by a high-pitched noise, later revealed to be an overactive cooling pump. In our test the EV achieved speeds of more than 65mph without straining and I was assured the acceleration issues were down to incorrect and easily fixed electronic control unit settings. The EV s main problem is its short range and six-hour charge time.
For short city hops it s fine (provided your nearest socket isn t on the 10th floor of a block of flats) but it will take improvements in battery technology to allow for longer distances between recharges. And the car s greenness depends, in part, on where the electricity comes from. Only a small percentage of Britain s electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind or solar power.
Still, an electric car is estimated to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by about 40%, compared with petrol engines. From the outside the Smart EV looks identical to any other Smart Fortwo only the cable and three-pin plug where a petrol cap should be give it away.
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