Smart #5 review

Smart seems to be dropping the word ‘premium’ into almost every sentence about the #5, and sure enough lots of the materials used on the inside are soft-touch and feel erm… smart. The top spec #5 gets plenty of Brabus badging inside plus some fake carbon fibre trim, but otherwise the materials are good with Dinamica microfibre seats and an Alcantara steering wheel.

Heck, even on the entry level Pro trim you get ambient lighting available in 256 different colours, not to mention electric seats. The design deploys lots of rounded rectangle shapes with the largest sitting right across the dash and incorporating the central touchscreen.

Lots of display area?

Oh yes. Up to three across the dash and a huge HUD too. The central touchscreen is a bright and responsive OLED, although it’s packed with menus and can sometimes be tricky to navigate. Thankfully shortcuts remain across the bottom of the screen at all times, but we’d still like some proper physical buttons for the climate control. At least Smart hasn’t gone for fancy touch-sensitive buttons on the steering wheel.

The central screen also gets wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and even when activated there are other shortcut buttons around the periphery of the phone mirror screen – climate, drive mode, access to car settings. There’s a ‘digital avatar’, a lion called Leo. He doesn’t really do anything useful.

The Premium trim adds a passenger screen, augmented reality head-up display, and 20-speaker Sennheiser sound system. The latter is absolutely excellent, with an output of 1,190 Watts and full 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos capability.

The passenger screen is less successful, and if the person who called shotgun starts streaming a video or playing one of the inbuilt games it can become very distracting for the driver.

How about space?

Legroom in the rear seats is hugely impressive, with more than enough space for a 6ft+ passenger to sit behind the same sized driver. The rear seats can also electrically recline and are heated from Premium trim upwards.

Thanks to the boxy shape, boot space is an impressive 630 litres. Oh, and the button to open said boot is hidden in the ‘a’ of Smart. For comparison purposes, the Skoda Enyaq gets 585 litres of luggage capacity behind its rear seats. The Smart also gets a 72-litre frunk if you spec the rear-wheel drive variant – which means enough space for a proper cabin-sized suitcase – although that shrinks to 47 litres if you want all-wheel drive.