Review of the new Smart fortwo CDI

The fortwo is Smart's view of what the modern city car should be all about. With the cdi engine installed, its one of the greenest cars it's possible to buy and if you can do without rear seats and much of a boot, it's a great, trendy way of getting about town. The fortwo is less at home on longer trips but can take to the motorway in an emergency.

As oil prices soar along with traffic congestion and air pollution, the small car concept that Smart launched on the world back in 1998 only looks more prescient. The original Smart car may have evolved into today's Smart fortwo but the basic theory behind it has scarcely altered. What has changed is that Smart's prediction that one day our cities and conurbations will be crawling with cars like this now looks likely to be realised. The Smart fortwo diesel certainly makes a compelling case for city dwellers to downsize.

It's taken a while but motorists are gradually coming round to Smart's way of thinking. Smart's problem is that rival manufacturers are too. The fortwo once stood virtually alone as a city car that adhered strictly to the principles of compact size, light weight, maximum fuel economy and a trendy urban cool image. Nowadays, you can't move at the motorshows for dinky vehicles from rival manufacturers trying to annex a slice of Smart's territory. To date, however, the fortwo remains arguably the purest exponent of the genre. Whether its reluctance to bend its own rules will give it an edge in the small car future remains to be seen.

The diesel engine that features in the Smart fortwo cdi is certainly a tiddler. 54bhp from an engine of 799cc with two valves for each of its three cylinders leads one to expect two things; fiendishly thrifty fuel consumption and performance that's relaxed to the point of being dead. Sure enough, the seventeen seconds it takes the diesel fortwo to cover 0-62mph sprint makes the word sprint look grossly inappropriate but remember the Smart's unflinching focus on urban motoring. On the road in its metropolitan element, the increment it takes the fortwo cdi to reach motorway cruising speeds is an irrelevance. The 130Nm maximum torque that's available between 2,000 and 2,500rpm is about what you'd expect from a 1.2-litre petrol engine. As a result, the Smart feels nippy when firing away from the lights and is relatively unfazed by inclines. The turning circle is hilariously tight and if there's an easier car to park, we'd like to see it. There's almost enough room for a pair of smarts to double up in most conventional parking bays.

"85.6mpg combined economy with 88g/km emissions will endow the fortwo cdi with a powerful appeal ."

Smart's designers did the decent thing and have done away with the sequential gearbox that was used in the original car, swapping its jerky six-gear set-up for a faster shifting, five-speed unit. The standard manual shift option gives decent control, letting you prod the lever to select gears yourself or flip the optional steering wheel paddles. Lift off the gas as you do this and it manages nicely enough but the softouch fully-automatic mode that features on the Passion models is preferable most of the time. This still isn't one of the great sequential auto boxes.

There's still a strong desire amongst city car buyers to have rear seats, even though they're likely to be used less regularly than the Queen's skateboard. A boot of more than 220-litres is another feature that the Smart deems unnecessary but the indications are that people like to have one all the same. You could also argue that the Smart is a little too small at under three meters in length and just over 1.5m wide. Still, it's perfect in town even if outside the city limits the car is towered over by tailgating HGVs and buffeted by cross winds. Smart, of course, would counter that all of this frippery falls outside the fortwo's remit of providing affordable, funky urban transport - something it does do exceedingly well.

Taken in isolation, the fortwo doesn't look too different to its immediate predecessor but sit the two cars back to back and it's easy to see where the changes were made. For a start, the smart has swelled by almost 20cm in length and 4.3cm in width but don't worry, it's still tiny. The track and the wheelbase have also been stretched but the majority of the length was imposed upon the company by pedestrian crash legislation. Inside, the fortwo now feels like part of the Mercedes-Benz family, rather than the scruffy stepchild that Smart's prestigious parent company would rather forget. Space for the two occupants is surprisingly generous, the switchgear feels quite upmarket and build quality is strong while the trademark funky design remains.

Available in two-door 'coupe' or convertible form and in pulse or passion trim - this diesel model doesn't pretend to be anything other than econobasic entry-level transport. The entry-level pulse version of the petrol fortwo comes with a two-spoke steering wheel, a black grooved plastic roof and steel wheels. The lower part of the instrument panel is made of grained black plastic, as are the door trims. There are even manual window winders. Everything bar the essentials for two adults to get cheaply and stylishly about town is stripped away by the cheapest model and motorists have shown some reluctance to go to these extremes. For them, the passion specification offered with the cdi might fit the bill better with its electric windows and panoramic smoked glass roof.

You have to admire the Smart's no compromise philosophy but rival manufacturers have shown that most of the fortwo's benefits are achievable in tandem with greater practicality and better performance in out of town driving. That the likes of Toyota's iQ and Citroen's C1 have been influenced by Smart design is a given.

In the current climate, a headline-grabbing fuel economy figure can do wonders for a car's profile and sales. The fortwo cdi certainly has one. It's takes a notoriously long time for a diesel city car doing a low annual mileage to justify in fuel savings the higher purchase price it commands over a petrol model. That said, 85.6mpg combined economy with 89g/km emissions will endow the fortwo cdi with a powerful appeal for anyone keen to do their bit for the planet, dip under the cut off point for congestion charging schemes or benefit from the convenience of a car capable of going from Dover to Prague on a single tank of fuel. Quite simply, this is one of the greenest cars on the road.

Insurance costs are driven down by the fortwo's ease of repair, the elastic plastic body panels being capable of shrugging off typical parking knocks. The white, black or yellow panels are flexible and the colour is deep moulded in, so superficial scratches are hard to spot. It also means that a more seriously damaged panel can be replaced inexpensively without need for costly and time-consuming repainting.

There will be plenty of motorists who really don't need a car that can do any more than the fortwo does but they'll need to overcome the desire many of us share to have the capability in reserve 'just in case'. If your excursions beyond the city limits are infrequent enough or you're simply willing to put up with the little Smart's lack of poke on the open road, you'll benefit from a vehicle that's perfectly at home in the urban landscape. The diesel engine's fuel economy and emissions are tough to beat in the mainstream market and the Smart still cuts it in the fashion stakes.

The fortwo's strict adherence to its urban transport concept is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Other manufacturers have appropriated elements of Smart design and now there are rival products that fulfil a similar role with more of the concessions to practicality and flexibility that many customers want. None can better the environmental performance of the fortwo cdi, however, and there's still kudos attached to owning the city car that showed the others the way.