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After a good 5 years, our smart electric drive went already over 200,000km. We are still excited about how little maintenance and how much fun you can have with a car. In this post I would like to tell you about the highlights and why it is an entry-level drug.

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It was on May 28, 2013 ...

when we became our smart ED3. With wide eyes we where watching as it rolled absolutely silently down from the truck into our driveway. My parents had…

When Brusa brought their NLG663 back in 2012 to the market, they where the first company to build a 22kW charger in series production. Back then, other manufactures where only able to fit 11kW in the same volume. The smart ED3 was the first electric vehicle to be equipped with it. A special feature of the 22kW charger is its high efficiency and its quiet operation, it also has a galvanic isolation between mains and HV battery and is VDE certified. That's also why it's being used in the 2.000 PS…

Who has been following smart eMotion for a while, knows that the smart electric drive has no problems with high mileage. My own smart ED3 reached the 200,000 km in November 2018 and still has 90 % of it's battery capacity remaining after 2,000 cycles.
At that time I already predicted that it would not be the HV technology that's going to eventually quiet its service. Was I right? What broke in the last 200,000 km?


At first I would like to thank Oliver and his wife for this phenomenal achievement:…

The smart ED3 accelerates already very well from the factory, but it gets even better with the 95 PS Tuning from the Brabus. This also brings the Brabus Sport mode. Since the smart ED3 and the smart Brabus ED3 got the same powertrain, the tuning can be easily performed via a software update. With the Brabus Tuning, your smart ED3 also drives 5 km / h faster.

In this blog post you will learn how to get the Brabus software in your smart ED3.

It is particularly pleasant that the Brabus software can…

Wouldn't it be better to swap batteries in 5 minutes instead of having to recharge them for 20 to 40 minutes?

Good question and since Nio now wants to establish exactly that in Europe, I talked to the Head of Power at Nio about this topic. In the past there have been attempts by others to do just that. Even Tesla had tried it and even had a working beta program, but couldn't get that to work either.
What makes Nio different and why do I still consider battery swapping to be a transitional technique, similar to the hybrid drive?

Dieser Testbericht wurde von meiner alten Webseite übernomen, zwischenzeitlich wird die elektrische B-Klasse nichtmehr gebaut.
Am Wochenende vom 28. bis zum 30. Oktober 2016 hat mir dankenswerter Weise S&G Pforzheim Mercedes electric drive B-Klasse zur Verfügung gestellt.

Meine doch gemischten Gefühle und Erlebnisse möchte ich hier mit Euch teilen und etwas über das Autos erzählen und auch darauf ein gehen, wie Mercedes mit der electric drive B-Klasse um geht und warum ich sie beim besten…

Dieser Testbericht wurde von meiner alten Webseite übernommen, er thematisiert den BMW i3 so wie er 2013 vorgestellt und verkauft wurde. Seit 2018 ist er mit der doppelten Reichweite und mehr Ausstattung verfügbar.

Über das Wochenende vom 8. und 9. Oktober 2016 habe ich einen BMW i3 (62Ah) vom Autohaus Müller in Leonberg bekommen. An dieser Stelle auch nochmal ein herzliches Danke an Herr Streicher der mir außerhalb des Standarts den i3 ein ganzes Wochenende überlassen hat.

Hier möchte ich über…

Martin from from Germany, the land of poets, thinkers and bratwurst. It was with this sense of humor that he set out to go on a 5,200 km road trip through nine countries across Europe with his smart Brabus electric drive convertible.

What he experienced on his trip and his travel recommendations can be found in this blog post.

The electric drive powertrain is clearly superior to the combustion engine. No question.

However, this is now causing a real hype, which is probably why there is currently a bubble. The underlying phenomenon is not new, history is full of examples from which we can learn: I am thinking of the Dot-com bubble of 2000 and the Video Game Crash of 1983-1985.
In this article I would like to explain to you how I come to this conclusion. I will also show why this will shake up the sector sooner or later and why it will not harm it in the long term. Actually, quite the opposite is right: The bursting of the bubble will clean the market again and make it even more consumer-friendly. But until then, some caution is required.

The 4th generation smart electric drive is based heavily on the Renault Zoe and that's why we had to wait a year until the 22kW charger became available. What took them so long was optimizing it to German standards.

I renamed the EQpassion page to smart eMotion. The attentive ones among you have already noticed. I have also completely overhauled the design of my website and made it even clearer.

You only realize how much of the current smart fortwo and forfour is from Renault when you put the wrench somewhere. We now have experience with this as well and would like to use the DCDC converter to show you what madness the smart EQ is.

It was presented as a study at the IAA last year and the new smart SUV is scheduled to arrive at the end of this year. Now the first photos of a prototype have been posted on one of China's largest social networks. What there is to see and my thoughts on it are in this article.

They had already told me at the IAA that smart wants to bring the Concept # 1 presented at the IAA onto the market as soon as 2022. They were able to take most of my skepticism about the tight schedule and now I can show you how serious they mean it.

These days smart applied for a patent for the production version of the Concept # 1 and for this they also had to show pictures of the final car.

This test report was taken over from my old website, in the meantime the smart ED has been renamed to smart EQ. The smart EQ is identical to the smart ED (from model year 2017 upwards) only the name has changed. At the time of publication, it was still called ED, so it will here be referred to ED.

Let's start with a tongue twister, the radar-assisted recuperation
First, of course, it immediately stands out that it looks very different than his predecessor and as we later realize, it is. The new…

Daimler is working with Geely to build the next generation of smart vehicles. The first one is going be the formore called SUV, which will also realign the brand. As previously reported, it will be based on the SEA2 platform. Geely now provides minimum specs for it's platform, which can then also be transferred to the smart.

They promise remarkable ranges and attractive charging times. Both many times better than what this vehicle segment had to offer up till now.


More range, less charging time -…

It was a long way before smart delivered the first production car in 1998. We all know the story of how Mr. Hayek came from swatch and wanted to build the infamous swatch car. A small, fully electric two-seater whose name the smart fortwo still bears in common parlance today.

But how was it really?

Over the last 5 years I have collected everything possible, written together and thought about it. This has now become the trilogy of the smarts story. The first part is about how Hayek's swatch car failed at VW. In the next two weeks I will then go into how it went on after that.

In the last weeks we have learned how Nicolas Hayek failed with his swatch car at Volkswagen and that Daimler Benz has been working with Professor Johann Tomforde on a similar project since the 1970s.

The following article is about how the two joint their forces between 1992 and 1998 to make the dream of an electric city car a reality. After the swatch group and Daimler Benz had found each other, it was time to turn the projects of the two companies into a joint car.

Last week we learned that Nicolas Hayek failed with the swatch car at Volkswagen. After that his path would lead him to Daimler Benz. A microcar project was already underway there, which fitted perfectly with Mr. Hayek's ideas.

But how did it come about and what did the first drawings from 1969 look like?

The man behind the article is Professor Johann Tomforde. In this article you can find out how his diploma thesis became the smart fortwo 30 years later.

Now the time had come, smart presented the latest study and thus also showed where the journey will go in the future. On Friday I was allowed to look at the study on site and ask smart my and your questions. The future is exciting and smart has big plans. The most important is now in the following article.