• Excellent built quality
• Unusual (but attractive) design
• Cutesy fox mascot on touchscreen

How is the quality and layout?

Quality is great. It’s light years ahead of the Jeep Avenger and noticeably better than the new Hyundai Kona. Almost everything within your wingspan is trimmed in soft-touch plastic – and the items that aren’t feature quality plastics. Surprisingly though, considering how much nicer it is inside, the Smart #1 isn’t any more expensive than these rivals. They’re all priced from around £36,000.

We rather like the layout, too. The infotainment system is comfortably within your sightline, which means you don’t need to divert your eyes too far from the road to check navigation instructions. The hidden storage bins in the centre console keep the cabin looking tidy, too.

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As it’s a Smart, though, the #1’s interior isn’t without its quirks. For example, there aren’t any dedicated physical controls to adjust the door mirrors. You need to dig around in the infotainment system for a door mirror control sub-menu and then use the directional buttons on the right-hand side of the steering wheel to adjust the mirror position, as you would in a Tesla. This could prove to be frustrating if you share the car with several drivers.

Infotainment and technology

Every version of the #1 features a 12.8-inch infotainment system. It’s crisp, fast and very responsive, which is good because almost everything on the car is controlled by it. The menu system is a bit convoluted, though. You navigate between the screens using a set of tiny icons at the top right of the screen – and the off buttons for the driver assistance technology are hidden behind several sub menus.

Sat-nav is standard, which is good because Apple CarPlay and Android Auto isn’t yet available on the #1. They will be added as an over-the-air software update soon, however. We didn’t really miss them, though, because the Smart’s built-in system is rather clever. It offers real-time traffic data and it has a database of EV charging stations, which makes it easy to plan charging stops.

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You even get a digital assistant in the form of a cutesy cartoon fox. It follows you around the infotainment menus, performing a different animations depending on the screen. It plays with a beach ball on the home screen, it sits in a chair on the climate menu and it hangs off a parachute on the quick-access menu. It’s a nice gimmick, but we were a bit disappointed by its voice. Its robotic tones are more Wall-E than whimsical woodland creature.

One last criticism – we’d have like some physical climate controls. You can adjust the temperature from a hot bar at the bottom of the screen, but the fan speed and fan direction controls are buried in yet another sub-menu. Despite all these quirks, the Smart’s system is still much more user friendly than the ID.3’s.

Comfort

• Good driving position
• Comfortable and supportive seats
• Loads of standard equipment

Every version of the Smart #1 comes with electrically adjustable and heated front seats. There’s even a handy memory function for the driver (which saves the main driver of the vehicle from wasting too much time digging around the infotainment system to reset their mirror settings).

The steering wheel adjusts for reach and rake, and there’s enough adjustment in the seats for tall and short drivers to get comfortable. The seat is set slightly higher than in rival SUVs – even our shortest tester felt the seat could have gone lower – but this raised seating position is arguably the whole point of buying an SUV.

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Smart did a good job with the #1’s seats, too. They proved comfortable during our time with the car and offered enough support to hold us in place when cornering hard. The rear seats are very comfy, too. This is handy because, during our test, we emptied the car’s battery pack and had to spend an hour sat on the rear bench waiting for it to recharge. Still, we learned that the Smart has more than enough space in the back to create a makeshift office. There’s even a charging port in the rear of the centre console to keep your devices topped up.