Are there any smooth manifolds $M$ with the following property: There exist a realizing metric $d$ (i.e $d$ induces the topology on $M$), and $d$ is smooth on all of $M \times M$? If not, is it possibe to guarantee smoothness of the function $x \mapsto d(x,y)$ (for a fixed $y$ ), or smoothness of $d^2$ even on a compact manifold? (I am trying to see if we can achieve "improved smoothness" if we do not force the metric to be Riemannian.) Of course, such a metric cannot be induced by a Riemannian metric. (see [here][1] and [here][2]). **Update and further questions:** (1) Joonas Ilmavirta showed $d$ cannot be smooth at a neighbourhood of points on the diagonal. Actually, the proof shows $d$ cannot even be twice continuously differentiable. (This is the regularity needed to bound from above the Taylor remainder*). Now a natural quesion is whether this regularity can be achieved by some metric? (I suspect not, in fact I think the distance should not even be differentiable once at the diagonal, the intuition is based on the example of absolute value on $\mathbb{R}$). (2) Is it also necessary for a singularity to exist at the diameter of the metric (for compact manifolds)? ________ *In fact the proof works even if we only assume $x \mapsto d(x,y)$ is continuously twice differentiable, and continuity of the partial derivatives (as functions of two variables). $ \frac{d}{dt}f(t,t) = \lim_{\Delta \to 0} \frac {f(t+\Delta,t+\Delta)-f(t,t)}{\Delta} = \lim_{\Delta \to 0} \left( \frac {f(t+\Delta,t+\Delta)-f(t+\Delta,t)}{\Delta} + \frac {f(t+\Delta,t)-f(t,t)}{\Delta} \right) = \lim_{\Delta \to 0} \left( \frac {f(t+\Delta,t+\Delta)-f(t+\Delta,t)}{\Delta} + \frac {f(t+\Delta,t)-f(t,t)}{\Delta} \right) = \lim_{\Delta \to 0} \frac{\partial f}{\partial s}(t+\Delta,t+\alpha(\Delta) \cdot \Delta) + \lim_{\Delta \to 0} \frac{\partial f}{\partial t}(t+\beta(\Delta) \cdot \Delta,t) = \frac{\partial f}{\partial s} (t,t) + \frac{\partial f}{\partial t} (t,t)$ ($0 \le \alpha(\Delta), \beta(\Delta) \le 1$ , Lagrange mean value theorem) [1]:http://mathoverflow.net/questions/21295/smoothness-of-distance-function-in-riemannian-manifolds [2]: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/967849/differentiability-of-the-distance-function