What's the best electric car for parking?

It’s one of the things that we motoring journalists like to say about an electric car – best suited for urban exploits, or some riff along those lines. It’s not usually that you’ll particularly enjoy throwing the car about the tightly packed streets of whatever endless suburban sprawl you happen to call home, but rather it’s often a euphemism for short range. 

Sure, buy your teensy batteried electric trinket, but don’t stray out of the city limits, because you’ll only have to stop and charge up again. Towns are brilliant for electric cars, mainly because they aren’t very big (the towns), and besides, you don’t need to use much power when you’re sitting at red lights or stuck in traffic jams and cursing the day you arrived into the world. 

There are a few electric cars ideally suited to life in the big city – a nice Fiat 500, perhaps, or a Volkswagen e-Up. Small, but with big ambitions. Or if you wanted to strike out a little more upmarket you could opt for the retrotastic Mini Electric or Honda e. Both a little pricey, but they’ll imbue you with an ineffable cool. 

There’s one car though that has been the poster wheels for the metropolitan elite for nearly 25 years, a concerted mash-up of style and substance that was inspired, strangely enough, by a cheap watch. The first Smart Fortwo was launched in 1998 (2000 in the UK), with rear-wheel drive, perky performance (as long as you had the manual) and a sub-1,000kg kerbweight.

Its short wheelbase and tight turning circle made for a lot of fun around town. It genuinely was designed for urban exploits. 
Somewhat surprisingly, there have been electric versions of every generation of Smart Fortwo, with the first arriving in 2006, a limited number available for corporate fleets to lease. The second-generation version was more widely available, with a Tesla-sourced 14kWh battery, later expanded to a generous 17kWh and an 84-mile range on the old NEDC system. 

Fast forward to 2019 and the Smart brand went all-electric. A smart move? No one’s been getting particularly excited about sales, but a tie-up with the indomitable Chinese carmaker Geely can only mean good things. 

Strangely though, the electric Fortwo hasn’t really moved on in the 15 or so years since it first got electric power – still a 17kWh battery, still a range that’s officially around 80 miles, but realistically more like 60. You won’t be able to get very far in your Fortwo, but at least you’ll have a blast parking it. Remember all that fuss about how you could just drive the car front in to the kerb instead of parallel parking? A delightful feature, not that anyone can recall ever having seen it happen.

The original’s chuckable go-anywhere (within reason) spirit lives on in the latest version, and there’s a new SUV due later in 2022, so this is the perfect moment to celebrate the quirk and style of this entirely confusing project that has somehow lasted over four different decades. If any other carmaker is waiting to take its space, looks like it’ll be there for a little while yet. 

Read our review of the Smart Fortwo EQ