In the first quarter of 2011, Renault plans to begin selling two mass-market electric cars, both based on existing conventional models. One will be an electric version of a conventional saloon, the other an electrified Kangoo van. Both will be sold in Europe and Israel, including right-hand-drive versions for the UK.

The electric four-door saloon will be based on the Renault Fluence, a new budget model developed alongside the Megane hatchback and designed for East European markets. This might not seem like a promising base vehicle for discerning Western buyers but is at least cheap, offsetting the potentially crippling cost of adding a quarter-tonne of lithium-ion batteries.

In the second quarter of 2011, Renault plans to roll out the production version of its Twizy urban electric vehicle. This tall, narrow runabout features tandem-style seating for two, with the passenger seated behind the driver with legs either side of the driver’s seat. At just one metre wide it will also – probably – fit between lanes of snarled traffic in the manner of a motorbike.

Thierry Koskas, the man in charge of electric vehicles at Renault, said the Twizy will be sold in two versions: one with a top speed of 50km/h (31mph), making it licence-exempt in some markets and therefore destined to be driven by lucky teenagers, and another with a 75km/h (47mph) maximum.

The Twizy will be homologated as a quadricycle (a legal category that is equivalent to a four-wheeled motorcycle) rather than as a full car, and as such will be exempt from much of the crash-worthiness legislation that applies to full-size cars. Renault is not about to jeopardise its hard-won reputation for safety, however, and the Twizy will offer a driver’s airbag plus curtain airbags at each side on the faster model, according to Koskas. “We would like to get as near to the car regulations as possible,” he said, “but we are saying it is an alternative to a motorcycle or scooter, not to a car.”

In the first quarter of 2012, the production version of Renault’s fourth electric car is due: called Zoe. Koskas says Zoe will be the same size and price as the Clio supermini and will be aimed at people who commute every day. The production car will be very little like the gull-winged Zoe concept shown off at this year’s Frankfurt motor show, except in overall size.

Koskas says the objective is to launch these new vehicles simultaneously in all their target markets, adding that with electric cars, the amount of adaptation required for different markets is actually less than for fossil-fuelled vehicles.

Renault is not planning to sell batteries to its customers – unless they really insist on owning them, according to Koskas. Instead, Renault is aiming to sell the empty car and then lease the power pack at a rate that will be cost-competitive for motorists who drive at least 30 miles per weekday (or at least 8,000 miles per year). Beyond that level of use, Renault’s electric cars are expected to become cheaper to run than their conventional siblings, although achieving high annual mileages in a car capable of travelling only limited distances between recharges will be a challenge.

Koskas’s statements suggest that break-even estimates have been based on an anticipated 2011 oil price of at least $100 per barrel, and if oil rises beyond that level, Renault’s proposition will no doubt seem rosier. If oil remains cheaper, then these upcoming EVs will be a harder sell.

While the Zoe will be pitched at the price of Clio, the likely cost of the tiny Twizy is less clear. Koskas said the sticker price will be in the same ballpark as a large, mid-range motorcycle, but he added that the actual amount is not yet set. He did mention the Piaggio MP3 – an upmarket three-wheeled scooter costing about £6,500 – as a key competitor.

The Zoe and Fluence will use the same 250kg battery storing 24kWh, while the Twizy’s 60kg battery will hold, presumably, about 5.75kWh. The Twizy will be charged only using the standard mains supply. The Twizy has no fast-charging option – as there will be for the bigger cars – but it will take only three hours to fully charge and most drivers will be unlikely to tap its full 100km range.

You can find out more about Renault’s plans at the firm’s Sustainable-mobility.org web site, including a video interview with Koskas (en français, with subtitles).

Here are the rest of the questions we put to Koskas, and his answers as near as we could scribble them:

GreenMotor.co.uk: We think the Twizy is a great concept – a really brave design and potentially a big step forward for urban mobility. Does the concept only work as an electric vehicle, or could we see a Twizy with a conventional engine?

Thierry Koskas: We want to associate the Twizy with electric drive and the environmental benefits of electric cars. It’s a new concept in transport and it would be pointless to develop a version with a conventional engine.

Does the combination of electric motor and battery allow you to achieve a package with the Twizy that would be impossible if you were starting with an engine, cooling system and fuel tank?

Packaging an electric vehicle is still a challenge – the motor is large, the battery takes some space, so the problem is actually about the same.

Will the production Twizy really look like the concept?

There will be changes of course. The mudguards will be built into the body, for example, but a lot will stay the same. One of the advantages of its layout is that we won’t have to do anything at all to convert it for sale in the UK.

Renault’s EVs only have one socket for both rapid charging and conventional mains charging, whereas most production-ready rivals have separate sockets. The Nissan Leaf has a large and small socket in its nose, while the Mitsubishi i-Miev has a standard socket on one side of the car and a fast-charge connection on the other. Will there be two sockets when Renault’s EVs are launched?

We only need one, because the fast-charging system will be different in Europe. In Japan the fast charge will be high-voltage DC (direct current), whereas in Europe it will be 240V 3-phase power.

Isn’t there a pressing need for standardisation, particularly between Renault and Nissan, who are partners?

Today we are still in a transition phase – the most important socket to standardise is actually the one in the charging point. You bring your own cable, so you know it will fit your car, but will it fit a public charger?

We’ve used Elektrobay charging points, and they hold their end of the cable in behind a lockable flap. Will the other end of the cable lock onto the car as well, to prevent passing vandals (or opportunistic EV owners) from disconnecting your car when you’ve left it on charge?

Yes, there will be a lock at the car end of the cable. We need to reassure customers that they can charge their car reliably and safely.

Will Renault offer remote monitoring of the car’s state of charge, using your mobile phone, for example?

Every car will be able to communicate with a datacentre – with messages both ways. The possibilities are endless. You can switch on the air conditioning remotely if you want to cool the car while it’s still plugged in to the charger.

Will the cars have remote telematics, so Renault can see how they are used?

We don’t want to be Big Brother, but some customers will allow us to very closely monitor use – I am talking about fleets, such as the post office, not private customers.

Does Renault see battery electric vehicles as a stepping stone to hydrogen-fuelled cars?

Well, our lithium battery technology will improve over time, and there are lots of other labs working on other battery chemistries. We don’t realistically see hydrogen as a factor in the next ten years.

You are using bespoke batteries with large cells, whereas Tesla and BMW favour using thousands of small commodity cells. BMW told us mass-produced generic cells are higher quality, because of the scale of production – what’s your opinion?

That’s the sort of answer you give when you don’t make your own batteries. In our alliance with Nissan we think the battery is a key aspect, and owning the technology is a key element to producing electric cars. We are much more confident because we know the costs, we can design batteries exactly for the car, and we are responsible for our own production capacity. We won’t be a victim of price fluctuations when multiple makers want to buy cells from the same providers.

Beyond batteries, do your upcoming electric vehicles share much with Nissan’s equivalents?

Yes, there is lots of component sharing - of things like heating, braking and motors. We are also collaborating on the global communications infrastructure and datacentres. There we are able to gain from the economies of scale.

From the driver’s seat, the most obvious clue that you’re sitting in an electric Mini is the big dial behind the steering wheel. A sweep hand falls inexorably from 100 to 0 as you pile on the miles. Below this analogue dial is a small digital trip computer, which can be set to display remaining range in miles.

BMW quotes a notional range of 100 miles per charge of its Mini E (it actually quotes 100 to 120 miles and 156 in ideal conditions, but with electric cars we’ve learned to look at the lowest number and work downwards). This means that the big dial ought to render the range predictor redundant – at 100% charge there should be at least 100 miles of motoring to go, and at 50% charge there should be roughly 50 miles remaining before you need to find a socket.

Only of course it doesn’t work that way.

We put the electric cabin heater on for five minutes at the start of our hour-long test, and drove the whole route as we would a conventional fossil-fuel car. We soon saw the range prediction and the battery meter part company. After 32 miles on urban and rural roads, the range was down to 47 miles, while the dial said 55% remaining.

Still, we suppose about 80 miles of electric motoring with warm toes isn’t bad, all things considered.

The Mini E is a development vehicle, rather than a potential product in its own right. BMW says it intends to launch a four-seat electric car “within the next four years”, and the Mini E is a mobile testbed for this “Mega City Vehicle”.

Roughly speaking, we have a standard Mini with a motor and control electronics in place of an engine, and a huge battery where the back seats used to be.

The battery weighs about a quarter of a tonne, and is conceptually similar to the power unit developed by Tesla Motors. Unlike, say, the bespoke flat-laminate batteries Nissan and Renault are making for their electric cars, the Mini and Tesla route to electrification is to buy job lots of cylindrical lithium-ion cells, of the kind usually destined for laptops. But whereas a MacBook might use three cells, the Mini swallows more than 5,000 of the things – built up in 48 bricks of 106 cells each. Overall, this power pack stores 35kWh, of which about 30kWh can be drained during normal driving, fed to the front wheels via a 150kW (200bhp) motor.

The Mitsubisi i-Miev, for comparison, carries 16kWh and a employs a 47kW motor, while the Tesla Roadster has 56kWh on board and a 185kW motor. BMW is also keen to point out that 200bhp is more than the Mini Cooper S can muster – its 1.6-litre petrol engine peaks at 175bhp.

The Mini E does indeed feel fast, but not Cooper S quick – carrying the 260kg battery is, after all, like having two 20-stone friends on board.

Climbing in, you first have to remember to open the correct door – all Mini Es are left hookers. Slot the electronic keyfob into its dashboard recess, and press the small stop-start button. The battery gauge swings into life as the power pack readies itself in complete silence. The cells are actively cooled, with air drawn through a grille behind the front seats and expelled under the car, but we couldn’t detect the whirring of fans.

The gear selector is standard auto stuff – push down on the brake pedal and depress the chrome safety catch to pull the lever back into D.

Release the brakes and – nothing. The car won’t creep forward until you give it a tickle of throttle. Once on the move, the car pulls away strongly but very controllably, with plenty of urge on offer. Give it a bit of welly and the car will just squat and go, producing a very satisfying turbine-like whine. Nought to 62mph takes just 8.5 seconds, and we have no doubt that the car will reach its limited 95mph top speed.

Actually, the delivery is not entirely clean and linear. Feed in power gently and you won’t notice any gaps, but stamp on the throttle from a standstill – lunging for a gap on a roundabout, say – and the car will pause, motionless, for just long enough to send your heart to your mouth.

There’s a similar non-linearity to the regenerative braking. The regen is set up much more aggressively than in other electric cars we’ve driven – it doesn’t feel like conventional engine braking, it feels like you’re pressing the brake. But this unusual response takes half a second to arise – lift off suddenly and press on again in less than half a second and you won’t slow down at all.

This makes for an unusual driving style that takes some getting used to. In normal driving you don’t touch the brakes at all – you drive everywhere simply by adjusting the throttle. Sensibly, BMW has set up the Mini so that the brake lights come on as soon as you lift the go-faster pedal.

According to Alexander Thorwirth, head of alternative drives at BMW, aggressive regeneration is the optimum approach, even if it feels odd. “We will see how it goes in the trial, but we think electric cars require some behavioural change and that includes adjusting to how the vehicle works,” he says.

We get where he’s coming from, but we wonder if it might be dangerous to adapt to a driving style where you rarely touch the brakes.

Odd pedal actions aside, the Mini E felt like a very mature package – much closer to a viable production vehicle than we’d expected. It’s very fast, reasonably responsive, handles and rides well and feels as agile as a Mini should. The range might be limited, but no more so than other electric cars.

True, there are no back seats and no boot to speak of – a suitcase would have to travel atop the battery.

We’re not sure we’d want to spend £330 a month to lease a Mini E though, particularly not in a six-month market trial. But apparently there are lots of people willing to pay handsomely to help BMW do its R&D – more than 500 people applied for the 40 places available on the UK trial. The shortlisted applicants will be hearing from BMW very shortly, apparently.

We wish them luck, and we await more news of the BMW Mega City Vehicle with interest.

At less that 3 metres from its button nose to its non-existent boot, the Toyota iQ is a very short car. You know that, intellectually, when you climb aboard, but you still struggle to get your head around the full extent of its lack of length.

A case in point: parking our iQ at the roadside, nosing in towards the car in front, we stopped at what felt like a sensible distance. Then we got out and saw that we’d left a yawning gap almost large enough to slot another iQ in. So we jumped back in. From the driver’s seat, the gap still looked and felt about right – you can’t see any of the car’s wee little bonnet, of course. So we nosed a bit further forward – towards what felt like imminent contact between our toes and the car in front. Satisfied, handbrake on, engine off, we jumped out. And there was still enough of a gap for an amorous couple to stroll through, arm in arm.

So owning an iQ requires a recalibration of the senses. And, thinking in the other direction, it’s also probably not a good idea to spend time in an iQ and then to leap straight into something with a long and expensive prow. We suspect Aston Martin’s notion of a dollied-up iQ as a town runabout for owners of its long and low machines is not such a good idea.

Perhaps our inability to think sufficiently small is proof that Toyota has succeeded in its goal of building a small car that feels big. There’s certainly plenty of width on offer – the iQ is comfortably wider than most city cars, and elbows are unlikely to feel hemmed in.

What’s absent, sadly, is a real grown-up car feel. There are too many of the little things missing that you’ll find in every big car these days.

It sounds trivial, but the vanity mirror in the sun-visor is not illuminated, for example. The seatbelts aren’t height-adjustable. The steering wheel feels lovely but doesn’t adjust for reach. And there’s no centre armrest option, despite a noticeable gap between the seats where one would happily fit.

In fact there’s no enclosed storage anywhere in the car – no glovebox, no centre-console cubby, no seat-back pockets – not even an ash-tray. There are long, unlined plastic bins in the doors, of course, and a cupholder between the seats, and that’s your lot. Coins for parking will need to travel in your pocket.

Overall the interior is a huge let-down, for those thinking of downsizing. Switches feel reasonable, but the larger plastic surfaces are kind to neither the eyes nor the fingers. Seat adjustment is by awful ratchety lever, and after sliding a seat to and fro to gain access to the rear you will find the seat-back has returned in its bolt-upright default. We failed to find a single fixture or fitting that surprised or delighted.

Rear-seat access is OK, and there is indeed enough room in the car for three and half adults. Although with a full complement aboard, nobody but the driver will be comfortable, and luggage will have to stay at home. Viewed as a two-seater with jump seats, though, the iQ makes perfect sense – and this approach will happily minimise the need to fight with the seat ratchets.

We drove a top-spec 1.3-litre car with the optional Multidrive continuously variable gearbox. We like CVTs, and slotting this one into D and forgetting about it is the perfect preparation for crawling the urban sprawl. Two-up, the car feels perfectly eager and engine noise is only intrusive if you floor it. The 1.0-litre car weighs 85kg less than the 1.3-litre version, coming in at just 845kg, making the bigger and more expensive engine something of a moot point.

Given that the motor must be about six inches from your knees, the interior is remarkably quiet and refined, and the ultra-compact aircon unit works very well.

The steering feels light and direct with typical Toyota numbness. The turning circle is an incredible 3.9m – much tighter than a London Taxi’s – but the helm still feels steady and predictable at speed.

We were surprised at the high quality of the ride on offer. Even with the iQ3’s 16-inch wheels the car felt very comfortable over small lumps and bumps – although there is often the unusual feeling that both the front and rear axles are lifting and falling at the same moment, rather than one after the other. Bigger surface imperfections and speed humps do provoke noticeable pitching, but that’s unavoidable in a car with a 2-metre wheelbase.

Relatively high-set seats help to combat any feelings of vulnerability created by piloting such a puny vehicle, as do the multiple airbags and the five-star NCAP rating.

Our test car was fitted with every bell and whistle going, making for a rather expensive experience. The base 1.0 manual costs from £9,615 and is relatively generously equipped. For our 1.3 engine add £2,000 (which also gets you climate control, keyless entry, auto headlamps, bigger wheels and chrome mirrors). Then add £400 for our grey mica paint, £1,000 for the auto box, £345 for mats, £690 for leather seats, £495 for a stupid spoiler and skirt, and £930 for the full satnav, Bluetooth and iPod experience. All in all, that’s a surprisingly hefty £15,475. In other words, a lot of money for a tiny, two-seat runabout.

There’s a lot to like about the iQ, but in the end it left us unconvinced. It’s not plush or posh enough for well-heeled drivers hoping for the perfect city runabout. They’ll still go and buy a Mini. And it’s too compromised for people who would otherwise spend the same money on a Fiesta or Corsa. It’s a better car than its Aygo sibling, but it costs a heck of a lot more to buy.

So for the moment there are some nearby stools, but this little car seems to be falling between them. And, unusually, all the problems are on the inside. We wonder if an early interior facelift might be in the works at Toyota HQ.

The MyCar is a striking little thing – design house ItalDesign certainly earned its fee, managing to make this short, narrow, three-box quadricycle look like a pocket-sized sports car.

The sport part is almost entirely illusory, sadly. The MyCar has a top speed just south of 40mph and it gets to that not-very-lofty peak in a leisurely fashion. The rear-mounted DC motor offers just 3.7kW (5bhp) of go-faster action but it does drive the rear wheels, which is kind of sporty. And a light tug on the high-set, blingy three-spoke wheel sees the MyCar change direction like a startled hare.

Lead-acid batteries under the seats store 9.6kWh and can be recharged in five hours using a standard 240V supply. You are then good to go up to 60 miles – although UK distributor EV Stores admits that heavy use of the throttle will see the useful range drop as low as 35 miles.

There’s a simple way to sum up all of the above: the MyCar offers inner city transport and nothing more. Don’t venture onto a dual carriageway unless you enjoy seeing an HGV radiator filling your rearview mirrror.

The MyCar, built in Hong Kong by EuAuto Technology, costs from £9,995 on the road in the UK, and London-based EV Stores says it is currently selling two a month.

The first thing that strikes you as you climb aboard is that the doors are not at all big. There’s enough headroom for a six footer, but having parked your bum on the low-slung seat you will likely need to fold yourself up like a gateleg table to get your other foot on board. The doors will then probably take two or three slams to shut properly – not because they are ill-fitting, but because their flyweight construction makes it difficult to swing them in with sufficient momentum.

The windows and mirrors are electric - controlled by switches down by the gearlever - and there's a simple strap to tug on during repeated attempts to shut the door. The gear stick itself is a dainty little lever, like the joystick from a 1980s video game. It offers forward, reverse and neutral positions, and to switch between one selection and another you must first lift a slim chrome collar. We wonder what happens if you neglect to lift the collar - we fear the whole lever might snap off.

Even a fleeting glance at the MyCar will tell you that it’s a small car with big wheels - the overall length is 2.65m, the wheelbase 1.69m. These dimensions are, incidentally, virtually identical to those of the Reva G-Wiz. The MyCar is 20cm lower, a fraction wider, and has fewer seats, of course. The MyCar’s 15-inch wheels are also a couple of inches bigger, while both G-Wiz and MyCar have turning circles to shame a London Taxi.

All these dimensions add up to a problem in the footwells. Wheelarch intrusion is severe, and the pretty aluminium pedals are notably offset towards the centreline. It actually feels slightly worse from the passenger seat, where you tend to sit with one foot on the wheelarch and your left knee in your face.

On the road the MyCar feels small and narrow and low, but surprisingly airy thanks to its glass roof. But while the brakes and the steering are good, it’s the all-important accelerator pedal that spoils the party. For the first three quarters of its travel, nothing at all happens - to the extent that we thought we’d forgotten to switch the car on. The final quarter of travel yields linear and controllable progress, but makes you feel that you’ve left the handbrake on. Because you sit low, and the motor behind you makes an appreciable amount of noise, it feels like reasonable speed, but the numbers on the digital speedometer don’t lie. This is a slow car.

So slothful is the MyCar that we can’t honestly recommend it. It might make the G-Wiz look like an extra from the Postman Pat set, but the gawkier car is actually the better bet. With its current power pack, the MyCar is a sad case of nice legs, shame about the pace.

We’ve crammed four adults into the interior of the Mitsubishi i-Miev, and the surprising thing is that we didn’t actually need to do any cramming. We just opened the four big doors and got in. As long as you don’t imagine for a moment that you can seat five, this short, narrow, jellybean-shaped automobile provides a surprisingly comfortable ride, with ample room for a pair of six footers behind another pair of fully life-sized people.

This is the first surprise about the i-Miev. Given its Japanese kei-car origin, we had imagined its interior would have a shrink-wrapped feel.

All four pews are also surprisingly comfortable and supportive, and the interior fixtures, while not screaming quality, at least avoid pleading poverty. On a hot day, the tinted, air-conditioned interior is a very nice place to be.

It’s also pin-droppingly quiet. On the move you hear more in the back seats than in the front, as the rear-mounted motor whirs gently somewhere behind your buttocks. The steadily climbing note as you accelerate has a clean, gas-turbine timbre to it. This Mitsubishi sounds like a car from the 21st Century. Which it is.

Taking the short walk around the perimeter we wonder where the crumple zones are, given the spacious interior and long wheelbase. But fear not, we are reasonably reassured by Japanese crash tests (which replicate most of the Euro NCAP collisions and speeds) in which the 2007 petrol-powered Mitsubishi i was awarded five out of six stars, and the crash test dummies were removed intact without resort to a tin opener.

The swooping screen pillars are evidently strong. But they do, unfortunately, get in the way at junctions.

From the driver’s seat, you can survey the unusual dashboard, dominated by an analogue dial that swings between maximum discharge and maximum regeneration, giving you an instant measure of how much your driving style is draining the juice.

In the centre of this dial is a digital speedometer, to the upper right is a circle displaying the odometer, and in the upper left the all-important battery capacity together with a gear-selector reminder.

Park, reverse, neutral, drive, eco, and “B” are the options on offer from the zig-zag automatic shifter. Eco gives more aggressive regeneration and more muted response to the throttle, to eke out more distance from the battery around town. B simply enhances the regen for steep descents.

There’s keyless ignition, but you wake the car up by stepping on the brake and twisting a black plastic knob protruding from the column shroud exactly where a key might normally slot. A little green light on the dash announces “Ready”.

Release the brake in drive and the car will creep forward in conventional automatic style, which helps to make a very clean and creamy getaway from a standstill. Of all the electric cars we’ve driven, this one has the most linear and most satisfying throttle feel we’ve sampled to date, with the possible exception of the Nissan EV-02. The i-Miev responds absolutely instantly and supremely accurately to the slightest twitch of your toe.

It’s got some urge too, pulling strongly away from a standstill in a manner that, say, the C1 Evie might only dream about. You quickly find you’re travelling about 20 per cent faster than you intended, the car’s rounded nose cleaving the air like an onrushing raindrop and leaving only the muted tyre roar to warn you of impending licence peril.

We were not able to verify the claimed top speed of 87mph or the quoted range of 80 miles. We have no doubts about the former figure, but remain to be convinced about the latter.

We found the steering nicely weighted and communicative too, helped no doubt by the 47kW (63bhp) motor being at the other end of the car and doing its duty through the rear rubber. Cornering is confidence-inspiring, particularly for what is a narrow car with high-set seats. Having the lithium-ion batteries stowed in the floor no doubt brings the centre of gravity down much closer to the wheel hubs.

Those batteries, all 16kWh of them, can be fed in two ways. On the offside rear flank, where the air-intake for the petrol-powered i-car lives, there’s the socket for a 240V domestic supply. On the nearside, behind the fuel-filler flap, there’s the chunky socket for a 200V three-phase fast charger.

Charging takes roughly six hours using the right-hand socket, and an 80-percent fill-up takes about half an hour using the left socket. No-one could tell us what happens if you use both at the same time.

We would rave about the i-Miev – it’s that good to drive – but for the drawbacks. One, the boot is laughably tiny. Two, the price may well permanently widen your eyes. When it goes on sale, eventually, it’s tipped to cost £20,000 to £25,000.

Yikes.

All electric cars currently require a commitment to going green that defies financial reason, despite the enthusiastic totting up of vendors who factor in every possible benefit, discount and incentive to show that it all makes sense if you squint. So does this miniature Mitsubishi manage to make some sort of fiscal sense? Um, no.

If the price predictions are on the money, we fear the endearing little i-Miev will carry a price tag too far.

We are back at Millbrook Proving Ground, and at last we have a chance to try the Smart Electric Drive – alas a very brief chance, and on the low-speed “city” circuit of tight twists and turns, not on Millbrook’s famous high-speed bowl or hill circuit.

It’s a dazzling day and the glassy Smart is cultivating a greenhouse effect of its own inside. There’s no aircon to tame the September heat.

Next year’s second-generation Smart ED will feature a Tesla-developed battery pack, but our car is the first-generation model. It is based on the facelifted original ForTwo (or City Coupe as it used to be called) fitted with an electric drive system by British firm Zytek. This uses sodium-nickel chloride batteries bolted under the seats, and a 55kW (74bhp) motor replacing the usual three-pot petrol engine at the rear.

From the driver’s seat the car is virtually unchanged from standard. There’s even a (non functional) fuel gauge among the instruments.

One of the Shrek-ear pods that sprouts from the dashboard now displays remaining battery capacity. Unusually for an electric vehicle, this is an analogue clock – its plastic hand pointing to about 80% as we clapped eyes on it. There is no attempt to translate this reserve capacity into useful range – that’s left as an exercise for the driver.

Smart quotes 72 miles between charges, and eight hours for a full charge.

The ignition key slots into the centre console next to the handbrake. Ahead is the stubby, joystick-like transmission lever. This has a gate shaped like an inverted “L” – to the left for drive, to the right for neutral, and back for reverse. It has a nice, mechanical feel to it.

Once switched on and ready to go, the motionless ED is not silent – there’s a quiet but noticeable thrumming noise coming from the power pack behind you, and a faint vibration you can feel through the brake pedal.

There’s a slight hesitation between pressing the accelerator and the Smart deciding to get up and go from a standstill. In an ordinary Smart, this could be blamed on the oft-criticised automatic transmission, but that can’t be the culprit here, as the ED has only one constantly-engaged ratio. The delay is not enough of a cough to get you T-boned at a junction, but just enough to make you think you might. Throttle response once on the move is instant, though.

At low speed, the unassisted steering felt reasonable light and direct, and speed was easy to modulate accurately.

There is a distinct squeak from the drivetrain as you set off, and more whine from the motor than we’ve heard in other electric cars. This singing from the Smart’s oily bits rises in concert with road speed, and here the ED is impressive. It is a quicker car than you actually need for city driving, between zero and 40mph at least.

Smart quotes a 0-30mph time of 6.5 seconds, which feels about right, while Zytek says the motor should be good for about 75mph. Smart has electronically capped progress at 60mph. It feels safe, solid and serene at speed, with no rattles or squeaks.

On our bone-dry test surface we failed to provoke understeer, and the firm suspension kept roundabout lean angles to a minimum. We suspect the central, low-slung battery gives a better weight distribution to the normally rear-biased ForTwo, together with a helpfully lower centre of gravity. Around corners and roundabouts, the car felt secure and very safe.

As long as you never turn left, that is. The combination of a relatively low header rail and a high seat base meant the rear-view mirror created a monster blind spot for us just where the road needed to be on sweeping left-handers. If the car were ours, we’d be seriously tempted to wrench the rear-view off entirely and rely on the door mirrors alone.

All in all, we liked the Smart ED more than we thought we might. It’s not perfect by any means – the tiny boot, poor driving position and low-speed hesitancy are distinctly black marks. But it feels solid and well-engineered and would probably keep you alive in a crash.

Would we buy one? Cost will be the issue – and for the production ED that remains to be seen.