First drive: Smart ForTwo Cabrio

What’s that, then? 

A Smart ForTwo, now with masses more headroom. 

So it’s a convertible? 

Sort of. The hood’s automated, but for the full experience you’ll need to pull over and, with the roof in its most open position, manually unclip the sidebars and ratchet them to the underside of the tailgate. The safety cell’s uprights and rear quarter lights remain fixed whatever you do with the flappy canvas bit. 

I have options?

Indeed. You can either fold the whole thing down or just open up the middle bit like a big sunroof. The latter is great at city speeds, but when you start to push on it acts a bit like a sail. All the air rushes over the top of the windscreen, catches and swirls around the cabin. It’s loud, and if you’re so endowed, does funny things to your hair.

Best just fold the whole thing away, but the way the canvas stacks up on the rear deck robs you of any rearward viability. Having just the middle bit open leaves the rear-screen in place, so what you have to do is decide whether you want to be able to see anything out of the back, or have a decent chat with your one and only passenger. 

Whatever you do, leave the sidebars in place. Removing them adds nothing to the experience and leaving them in means you can operate the roof at whatever velocity takes your fancy, even our car’s 96mph top speed. 

Numbers. I need more numbers. 

As you’d expect, most of them are rather small. For now, your engine choices are limited to the two already available in the regular ForTwo, ForFour and Renault Twingo – with which the Smart shares a great deal. The one to have is the 89bhp 0.9-litre turbo – it’s the most powerful of the pair (until the Brabus arrives this summer) and just £595 more than the turbo-less 70bhp 1.0-litre, which simply hasn’t the speed. 

Ours was a turbo car with the optional DCT (a five-speed manual is standard). It’s not a great gearbox by modern standards – you can catch it dozing and some of the shifts are weirdly sudden – but it’s still so much better than the horrid automated manual the old one was saddled with. 

We might be tempted to go for it over the manual – in town, ease beats involvement. 

You mean, it’s not involving? 

Of course not. It’s not unpleasant to drive – the steering is sharp and darty, and the turning circle is faintly ridiculous – but it’s not a thing for blatting down a country lane. Fun in town, though. There’s adequate punch from a standstill, even if the (lumpy) start/stop takes a split-second too long to restart the engine, and its size makes for swift progress through little gaps. It does weigh a bit more than the hard-top, with the roof mechanism plus strengthening, but you won’t notice. Out-of-towners should look elsewhere, but for buyers who only occasionally venture up a motorway, it’ll do just fine. 

The chief dynamic let-down is the ride, which is just on the annoying side of firm (thank the uber-short wheelbase). But if you buy into the Smart thing – the tiny dimensions, the lack of luggage space and the distinctive styling – you’ll pay it no mind. It’s just how it is. 

How about inside? 

Like the hard-top, only colder. The cabin is spacious enough but the boot is tiny, and made even smaller if you need to stow those sidebars. The sat-nav is a bit rubbish – it tried a couple of times to route us down one-way roads the wrong way, for example – but everything else works as it should and looks good. 

Should I buy one? 

If you ‘get’ the whole Smart thing, then yeah, you may as well. For urban scything, it’s almost ideal. And while it can do everything else, we wouldn’t necessarily recommend you ask it to. 

The Cabrio does command a fairly hefty premium, however. Prices kick off at £13,265, around £2K more than you’d pay for a hard-top, and rise to £15,550 for one like we drove. And you can spend even more by enrolling in the Brabus Tailor Made programme, where virtually any colour can be had.