Smart Ed Review

Posted: 28 February 2008 by Adam Vaughan

The south London hill that left the Mega City struggling to get beyond 20mph (Denmark Hill) proved no match for the smart ed, which whizzed up at 30mph. If it wasn't for the milk float electric whine, we could deceive ourselves we were driving a petrol car. As you'd expect, just like the G-Wiz and Mega City, the ed is virtually silent compared to a noisy, bog standard combustion engine car.

There are only two real downers for the driving experience. One is visibility in the rear mirror, where the seats' head-rests obscure about a quarter of the view -- the result is not very bad by any means, but you should be aware of it. Second up is the positioning of the electric charging connector, which is on the car's right-hand-side rather than the left. That's a pain when you're plugging into free street-side charging stations like the ones in Westminster.

Eco credentials are impeccable, provided you charge the car using a green electricity tariff. Theoretically, it then uses zero carbon to run on a daily basis; in practice, a lot of the electricity will still be coming from dirty coal power stations until government sorts out the capacity of renewables in the UK. We also like the smart brand's informative environment-focussed pages online and detailed sustainability pages on parent company Daimler's site. Smart makes its cars in Böblingen, Germany, and it meets the respected ISO 14001 series of standards for environmental management, as well as making small detail efforts such as making the wheel housing covers from recycled materials.

We have some misgivings over parent company Daimler's ethics, though. For one, it comes in at the bottom of the Euro league table for CO2 emissions, with its cars clocking average emissions of 188g of CO2 per km in 2006. To put that into context, Toyota came top with 153g and the EU has said new cars must emit 120g or under by 2012. The company was also winner of the Worst EU Lobbying and Greenwash Awards 2007 for lobbying against those 2012 EU CO2 car cuts.

Then there's the military connection -- Daimler's Mercedes-Benz Special Trucks Division supplies trucks and vans for military purposes. While we don't mark too harshly against that, it may be a deciding ethical issue for you.

Before you reach for your phone to book a test drive, we've got some bad news to deliver -- the ed's still not on sale to the general public. Since December 2006, the car's only been available to executives, two lucky councils and a few jammy company fleets. As such we've given it a 7.0 for value on the grounds that, although we don't know the sale price, it would be cheap to run -- smart estimates it as being the financial equivalent of a 300mpg petrol car. Read our G-Wiz review to see the other bunch of cash savings that electric cars enjoy.

The availability's a real shame, as this car has the kudos, eco creds and performance to persuade some serious swathes of people that electric cars are a serious proposition. Please please email smart and tell it to get this green machine on sale tomorrow.