2010 Smart ForTwo cdi: more power and torque

Mercedes seems to insist on making its small Smart ForTwo city car better and better. Their latest announcement shows that the latest upgrade will make the gearbox happy: more power and torque. But as one of the darlings of the green series, ForTwo still maintains its impressive low emission standards.

I’ve always looked at the Smart ForTwo and had inappropriate thought. “I wonder how much power you could squeeze out of that engine?” “If they had a one make racing series for these little guys, what would a pack of 40 or so of them look like heading into a corner?” Things like that.

Now, a lot of people, say, the engineers that work on Toyota’s Prius, don’t strike me as the sorts that would consider a one make racing series, or getting more grunt out of they hybrid drivetrain. Not so, it would seem, the engineers at Mercedes-Benz’s Smart division.

No, they decided that what the car needed, in this case, the cdi diesel variant, was more power and torque.

For model year 2010 the Smart ForTwo cdi has been given a significant power boost, the three-cylinder diesel engine will produce 21 percent more power and deliver approximately 18 percent more maximum torque. That’s not bad, not bad at all. No, the car didn’t have that much power and grunt to begin with, but still bumping things up by a fifth is pretty good no matter how you look at it.

At the same time, the MB engineers did this while keeping the CO2 emissions at the previous levels of 88 g/km, which are the lowest for any diesel-powered car. Also in the eco department, from 2010 onwards all variants of the Smart ForTwo (including the tricked out BRABUS versions) will comply with the strict emission limits of the EU5 standard.

Now, for those of you number crunchers out there, the HP and pound-feet increases bring the car UP TO 54 hp and 130 Newton meters of torque which ain’t all that much, but a horsepower gain is a horsepower gain. MB says the car ” ... now sprints from 0 – 100 km/h in just 16.8 seconds.” And all I can say is that’s a pretty liberal interpretation of the words “sprint” and “just”.

Whatever they choose to call it, the Stuttgart engineers got the gains through modified pistons and adjusted injection and charge pressure parameters. They lengthen the ratios of the third and fourth gears and lowered the shifting points in the automatic program. Oh, and they helped the ForTwo meet the incoming EU5 standards with a closed diesel particulate filter.

This is their press release: