New Smart Electric Drive range arrives – ForTwo, ForFour & ForTwo Cabrio EVs

A complete range of electric Smart cars has been revealed, with the new Electric Drive ForTwo, ForTwo Cabrio and ForFour heading for a debut at the Paris Motor Show.

If you think of the Smart range as cars best suited to the City, whether it’s the tiny ForTwo and ForTwo Cabrio or the surprisingly commodious Smart ForFour, then they’ve just become even more suited with the arrival of Electric Drive versions of all three cars in the Smart range.

And you really will need to keep in the City, as the Smarts on offer come with an official range, at best, of just 100 miles, and you can probably take at least 30% off that in the real world. Still, if you’re just blatting round town during the day, and have somewhere to plug in at night, that’s just fine.

An you’ll need somewhere to plug in at home, because it takes 2.5 hours for a blast from 20 per cent to full with a wallbox, and six hours if you just plug in. Which is better than the old Smart ED, but not exactly earth shatteringly swift, although Smart are promising a 22kw fast charger option at some point in 2017 to fully charge in under an hour.

Performance is adequate for what it is, with the 80bhp electric motor delivering 118lb/ft to the back wheels, 0-62mph in 11.5 seconds (12.7 in the ForTwo) and on to 81mph.

If you want to shout you’re driving an electric Smart, you can opt for the Kermit green bits you can see on the photo above with the Electric Drive Design Package, although you can leave the Smart as bog standard too. You can also have BRABUS titivations if you choose.

Inside, the Smart EDs comes with extra dashboard instruments with a power meter and battery status display, and you can use a Smart Control App to access lots of electric info and cool or heat the cabin before use.

Smart hasn’t revealed pricing for the new ED range, but in Germany the range starts from €22k, with a smart electric drive greenflash launch model from €28k, which doesn’t auger well for a cheap as chips Smart ED city car.

But by the time the Smart ED range actually arrives in the UK – September 2017 (yes, another year away) – we should know which side of £20k the prices start.