Category: City Cars 
Price Range: £8,518 to £16,026
Refined, free road tax, safest in electric class.
Limited range, occasional driveline shunt, poor steering feel, potential list price.
Smart ED comprehensively outclasses its quadricycle alternatives, but is still hobbled by a poor range and lengthy recharge time.
The Smart ED is in another league for quality compared to its cheap-feeling, poorly built quadricycle alternatives.
The Smart's interior, for example, clearly benefits from all the money ploughed into it by its Mercedes-Benz parent company. However, when you compare the ED to a some of its fossil-fuelled alternatives, the overwhelming feeling of quality begins to slip, with cheap-feeling plastic the order of the day.
As far as reliability goes, the Smart ED is an unknown quantity. Like most electric vehicles, the engine is maintenance-free: instead, we would be more worried about how long those expensive batteries would last.
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wrote on 11 08 2006