Smart ForFour vs. Mini 5 doors: Does a Fight Makes Any Sense?

It has been quite some time since BMW and Mercedes-Benz decided to enter the town-cars market using some satellite brands. The Bavarians acquired Mini and repositioned the British brand. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz made an interesting move by offering a very small and funny micro-city-car. The car gets the name of a famous watchmaker, Smart.

At the beginning, the smart ForTwo had nothing in common to the new Mini hatchback. That was except the public that both cars were targeting: the young and open-minded city-travellers, that could afford to buy a premium city-car. But then the ForTwo had a brother, ForFour. The sibling could  accommodate four passengers, just like the Mini. The history repeats at 2014 Paris Motor Show. But this time, we are talking about the second generation of smart ForFour and the third generation of the new Mini, available for the first time in a 5-door hatchback variant. So, if BMW and Mercedes-Benz are competitors, does it also apply for their “children”?

They are both premium 4-doors hatchbacks. But the smart ForTwo is 50 cm shorter and more unconventional

The new smart ForFour is a cute 3.49 metres long little car and is obviously the four-door and four seats version of the lilliputian smart ForTwo. Both cars have the same design of the front-end and back-end, and also the same interior cockpit, but smart ForFour is more spacious and practical. The new Mini 5-doors is also the four-door version of the normal Mini, but it’s almost 4 metres long, which is half a metre more than the ForFour. So the Mini isn’t that mini anymore… In fact, the Mini 5-doors is more a subcompact car than a supermini. That means that the customers of smart ForFour are not going to be too impressed. That is because they are looking a smart package for urban travel, which means small dimensions.

The Mini has an already known sophisticated interior design, while the smart ForFour is much fresh and colloquial

And then is the technical disagreement: the smart ForFour has the engines in the back, while the Mini has the engines under the front hood. ForFour is a rear-wheel drive (like the BMW’s…), while the Mini is a front-wheel drive. The engines of the smart ForFour vary between 61 and 90 HP, while the Mini 5-doors starts from 116 HP. The smart ForFour has no diesel (at least for the moment), while the Mini 5-doors has two diesel units. There is no sport variant of the smart ForTwo, so Mini Cooper S 5-doors doesn’t have a match. The manual in smart ForTwo is a 5 speed, the manual in the Mini 5-doors is a 6-speed. The automatic of the ForTwo is a 6-speed double-clutch Twinamic, while the automatic of Mini is a classical one, also with 6-speed.

Smart ForFour has smaller engines, that find their place at the rear. Meanwhile Mini 5-doors is a more powerful front-engined.

Indeed, we find nothing that says the two cars should get into a fight – they are simply too different. Even the differences in prices are huge, with the smart ForFour starting from 11.555 euro in Germany. That is much less than the base price of 18.350 euros for the Mini One 5-doors (which easily passes the 20.000 barrier because of the long list of optional equipment).

So we can conclude that these new cars have nothing in common, despite their “parents” are strong rivals. Still, we raise a question regarding these two world-premieres of the 2014 Paris Motor Show: who is right, Mercedes-Benz or BMW? In the first case, the smart ForTwo is even smaller than it’s predecessor. And it is clearly a smart city car, an idea that the brand promoted from the beginning. On the other hand, the 5-doors Mini is very far away from the initial philosophy of the Mini brand and it’s becoming a real contender for it’s cousin, the BMW 1-Series. This point of view taking into account, we think the smart ForTwo is a more appropriate offer for the urban travel, in a premium way.