Smart Brabus Fortwo 2016 Review

Smart Brabus Fortwo    
First Drive
Dusseldorf, Germany

It doesn’t feel like a Brabus, yet it still feels like a smart, albeit a very well trimmed and much faster one. It’s a shame it’s judged on its 0-100km/h time, when 99 per cent of a smart Brabus’ time will be spent below 80km/h, or even 60km/h. In that context, it’s quicker, stronger and more fun in its intended environs than its 9.5-second sprint to 100km/h suggests.

Most of the cars Brabus gets involved with are built to scare people. Perhaps the only truly scary thing about the Brabus version of the smart is that there’s really no upper limit to how much you could make one of the 2.7-metre tearaways actually cost.

It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that offering to match the car’s interior leather with a favourite handbag or the exterior with a favourite lipstick was the preserve of low-volume supercar makers like Lamborghini or Ferrari. Now you can do it on a smart, if you’re prepared to fund it.

Given that the entry price for the gadget is a tick under €20,000 in Germany, smart reckons on the average real-world price for a smart Brabus to tick up to at least €25,000 and plenty of them will jump beyond €30,000, and that’s starting to get a bit silly.

But there are people who can afford to enjoy a bit of personalisation in a car, yet don’t have a lot of room to park a car.

For them, a Brabus warm up on a smart is just about right and before you demean the concept as silly, remember that almost 10 per cent of the last-generation smart wore Brabus badges.

For that, you’ll get things like Nappa leather for the steering wheel, which smart purports to be one of the big highlights.

For most other people, though, they’ll look first at the twin tail pipes (the stock version has one pipe, trailing out of the left side). Then they’ll look at the specs, because they can’t physically see the engine, and they’ll note it’s toting 80kW of power and 170Nm of torque.

Now, to be fair, these aren’t big numbers in their own right, but they’re big numbers in the context of the tiny city runabout. They’re especially big numbers in the context of a tiny city runabout with not much space for fiddling stuff. But fiddle stuff they have. It’s the Brabus way.

The 989cc three-pot has been fiddled from the stock Fortwo, with higher fuel pressure, better breathing on both sides of the pizza ovens and Brabus has also taken care of the exhaust, all of which lifts the power up nearly 20 horsepower.

It also improves on the old Brabus smart by flinging the dreadful old electronically managed manual gearbox for what it calls the Twinamic dual-clutch transmission, with six ratios shorter than the stock Fortwo's, and 40 per cent quicker shift action.

The little gadget is rear-wheel drive only and, thankfully, you can’t turn off its skid-control system. It might be wider than the old smart Fortwo Brabus, but it’s also just as short and organic reaction times normally wouldn’t be enough to turn wild spins into just skids.

Underneath, the springs and dampers are 20 per cent stiffer than in the stock smart and the front anti-roll bar is nine per cent stiffer, too. And the ride height is 10mm lower, plus the variable-ratio power steering has more feedback and the ESC has been retweaked to let it slide just a little before catching it.

That wheelbase is also why it’s limited to 165km/h (the longer Forfour runs to 180km/h), but it still runs to 9.5-second sprints to 100km/h.

Now, that isn’t quick by most standards, but for a tallish, ultra-short thing that was originally designed to dart in and out of tall buildings, it’s not bad. And it’s quicker to 60km/h than it seems.

But is it a sports car? Is it a Brabus? Is it a clothing exercise? And is it fun?

Well, it’s clearly not a sports car, but it is fun and it is quite chuckable. You can throw it around freely, easily and without apprehension.

And it’s a lot quicker than the numbers suggest, especially around town. It can dart in and out of city gaps faster and easier than you could manage in a low-slung supercar, because it’s so much shorter.

There’s nothing quite like it for zapping around cities, and doing it perfectly within the laws and the speed limits. To help, there’s even a launch control, that’s simply a matter of standing on the brake and accelerator at the same time, and then just releasing the brake.

There’s a little pause, then the computers get their codes together and off it goes, leaping away from the lights like it means it, all blaring three-pot warble and barely muffled attitude.

It has some handling quirks that will take a while to get comfortable with, though it’s faithful, for all that.

The short wheelbase and oddly-sized tyres (Yokohama 185/50 R16 at the front and 205/40 R17s at the rear) mean that it will always understeer at its limits, but the back is never far away from following it.

You can make it begin to slide, and it will allow more freedom than the standard car, but then the computers take over and it all arrests itself calmly and cleanly.

There’s less grip on offer in faster corners than you might be used to, but it’s not designed much for faster corners. It’s designed for the cut and thrust of 90-degree city bends and intersections.

But the understeer is simple to control, needing just a small lift-off on the accelerator, then the admirable throttle control means it takes the weight off the rear axle very quickly. The wheelbase is so short that it pitches that weight back onto the front, and the grip regathers quickly and safely, every time.

With a wheelbase of just 1873mm, cornering hard in the Brabus feels a bit like the car is always trying to rotate around its axis every single time you lift off at the point of understeer. It stops being quirky after a while and becomes quite fun.

The stability under braking is a massive point of improvement over older smarts, though it’s still pretty squirrely if you try to brake hard from high speed (which means anything over about 100km/h).

The interior, too, is a big step forward, with classy leather trim everywhere, but the custom trim is undone a bit by the high-speed wind noise (again, at anything over about 80km/h).

It’s surprising fun, but it’s expensive fun. Very expensive fun.

2016 smart Brabus Fortwo pricing and specifications:
On sale: Not here
Price: €20,000 in Germany
Engine: 0.9-litre turbo-petrol three-cylinder
Output: 80kW/170Nm
Transmission: Six-speed dual-clutch
Fuel: 4.5L/100km
CO2: 102g/km
Safety rating: TBC