With an Audi S6 for weekdays and a Toyota GR Supra for weekends, Philip Thomas could fairly be described as a petrolhead.
At least that was until the IT specialist stunned his neighbours by recently adding a third car to his fleet: a Smart #1.
How the curtains twitched, but this was no ordinary #1. Although the standard model has a Golf GTI-beating 268bhp, Thomas had instead opted for the Brabus variant with 422bhp – around as much as his Audi.
However, where the S6 is a low-slung saloon with performance engineered into it, the Smart #1 Brabus is a compact SUV that, aside from its additional, front-mounted motor, is almost identical to the standard model, right down to its tyres and suspension.
“The Brabus is certainly quick, but it’s not very elegant,” commented our road testers when they got their hands on the model.
Thomas describes the Brabus’s performance as “brutal”. “You can feel the twin turbos in the Audi and the Toyota winding up and the power coming in, but on the Brabus the power is instant,” he says.
“If you aren’t paying attention, you can be doing 80mph in a flash. The fact that there’s no increase in engine noise doesn’t help. It’s very fast, but you can feel the system fussing away as it shares power between the motors, whereas my S6 just feels planted.
"I couldn’t imagine my elderly mum going from her Skoda Fabia to even just the 268bhp Smart #1.”
However, that’s exactly the kind of switch increasing numbers of drivers are making as they migrate to electric cars.
They may not be going straight into 422bhp EVs, but many are trading across, or up, into cars that can comfortably out-accelerate a hot hatch.
Of the new EVs on the forecourt, only a handful, including the Volkswagen ID 5 Pro 174PS, take 10 seconds or longer to accelerate from 0-62mph.
Join the debate
Add your comment
Autocar complaing about cars being too fast?? Please!! It stinks of being another EV hit piece. Embarrassing.
European data says EV's are safer and have a lower frequency of accidents compared with ICE cards but are much more expensive to repair. That I can believe.
Perhaps the UK is an outlier compared with the rest of Europe. In any case, on the whole EV's do have an addictive torque hit and can be uncomfortably fast if you press the pedal. But you don't have to drive them like that and actually it's a calmer, smoother and much cleaner experience regardless of the manufacturer.
It's not the first time. A while ago they noted as a negative in a review that the car was too fast. It was a French car.
Behold the latest anti-EV fart!
Different EV's can deliver their power in very different ways. We have two, a BYD Dolphin and Cupra Born, they are similar size, similar power output, on paper performance and battery size, although one is front drive and the other rear. The Cupra is very much instant off the line power delivery and feels much quicker than the performance figures suggest, but performance tails off noticeably over 60 mph, the Dolphin is opposite, feeling relatively sluggish off the line but power seems to rapidily increase afterwards leading to two very different feeling cars. That feeling also translates to realworld performance, lining the two up from a standstill start the Cupra gets a significant jump on the Dolphin off the line, and it stays that way to about 50mph, when the Dolphin catches up and stays with it until both hit their limiters. The Cupra feels very much like an electric car, whereas the BYD feels like a petrol car rather than electric.