Budget Rent a Car and DaimlerChrysler SA have got together to bring the smart to South Africa nearly a year before its official launch in this country. The smart — without a capital — was jointly developed by Mercedes Benz and Swatch, the watch people, in the late Nineties as a city runabout, and sales in Europe have boomed.
A nifty little two-seater, measuring just 2,5m in length and a fraction more than 1,5m in width, it boasts plastic mudguards and doors clipped on to a steel passenger cell. Dual air bags and ABS are standard, as are a radio/Bose sound system, electric windows, a breakdown kit and air conditioning.
I got to drive both versions of the smart a week or two ago, and found it to be an interesting experience. For a car that looks like a golf-cart there’s a fair amount of interior space. The little rear-mounted turbocharged 600cc three-cylinder four-stroke engine, driving through a six-speed auto gearbox, performs far better than its specifications would suggest — top speed is electronically limited to 135kph, and the little car gets to that speed fairly quickly and maintains it with ease. The six-speed auto transmission is slow-changing but fun. The overall experience is more Swatch than Mercedes — young, fun, and different. The Cabriolet especially — electrically operated soft-top, nogal — should be heaps of fun as a city runabout. The only danger, as one wag pointed out at the Budget launch, is that if you forget to undo your seat belt you could end up lugging the car around all day like a rucksack!
Budget will have 200 smart cars on hire at its Durban, Gauteng and Cape Town outlets. Pricing is hugely appealing — R115 a day with 350km free mileage thrown in. With close to 20km squeezed from each litre of fuel it’s unlikely to bust the bank at petrol stops either.