These search terms have been highlighted:       smart   car
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: nos

That's nothing new - I have several pages that do this.

And it's been occupying my mind a little for some time.

A link is traditionally regarded as a "vote" for the site, and is held
to increase its popularity.  Anchor text in such a link is a "vote"
for each of the keywords - is Google trying to improve the quality of
search results by actively responding to keywords that the author of a
particular page may simply have omitted?

It seems to me that anchor text keywords are only marginally less
important than <title> keywords, and as important if not more
important than any other keywords.