Smart ForFour

The Japanese firm's new Colt is designed for Europe and made in Holland. Built alongside it, and sharing 60 per cent of the structure, is the Smart ForFour, a distinctive five-door hatch. The two cars, on sale in September, share a Japanese-made petrol engine line-up of a three-cylinder 74bhp 1.1-litre, a four-cylinder 95bhp 1.3 and a 107bhp 1.5. All should return 45mpg-plus.

Completing the range is a German-built 1.5-litre turbodiesel with 68bhp or 95bhp. Five-speed manual transmission is standard, and a six-speed auto box is optional. Visually, however, the Colt and the ForFour are chalk and cheese. The Smart has been design-ed to resemble the familiar ForTwo, so the frame has been exposed and painted silver, and it has plastic panels that resist parking knocks, but are not particularly well finished.

Inside, the ForFour has four standard seats, although you can specify an extra one at the rear. Headroom is generous all round and, with a sliding back bench, occupants can make their own legroom/boot-space compromise.

The Smart family look is carried through to the dashboard, which is well built and attractive, with plenty of neat storage solutions. Six airbags, anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control are standard, and Smart predicts four stars in the Euro NCAP crash tests.

Driving pleasure was one of the main design aims, but engine noise is the most obvious flaw as soon as you pull away. The revvy powerplants make their presence felt at all times, but even the smaller-capacity petrol units are gutsy and pull from low engine speeds, especially the three-cylinder 1.1 with its mad, warbling engine note. Although the manual gearbox has well spaced ratios and a short, snappy shift, the automated six-speed is a better bet. While this still features a slightly ponderous upchange, it is a vast improvement on the automated gearboxes in other Smart models. It is also super-fast on the way down the ratios and, while the steering wheel-mounted paddles are not well sited, they are easy to use once you get accustomed to them.

On 16-inch wheels, the ride is not very good, thumping noisily into potholes, but 15-inch rims provide much more suppleness. Overall, road grip is commendable, and the Smart can be thrown into corners with no nasty handling surprises. Yet it isn't a particularly pleasurable experience. Huge A-pillars restrict vision into bends, while the steering lacks feedback and is dead around the straight-ahead position. The disc brakes are powerful, but the pedal action feels crude.

Smart has moved from making a novelty town car into a mainstream market where the competition is deadly serious. While the ForFour has many of Smart's popular design cues, it's very conventional under the skin, and with prices ranging from ΂£10,000 to ΂£15,000, it looks expensive, too.