It’s over for the once revolutionary two-person Smart | Car

The Smart was created in the late 1980s in the creative mind of Nicolas Hayek, designer of the Swatch watches. He wanted to turn the car into a kind of fashionable impulse purchase, just like his watches are. The product, which was to be called Smart, had to be cheap, small and boldly styled. When he once dreamed about this out loud to Professor Jürgen Hubbert of Mercedes-Benz, he responded almost immediately.

By inspiring each other, the plan for the ultimate city car grew into a kind of comprehensive transport concept for urban conglomerates. Special train wagons would be developed so that long distances could also be covered with the Smart. Owners with a club card could also rent a large car at a discount from Mercedes dealers, for example for a holiday or move, and the Smart had to be sold in department stores and shopping centers.

However, few saw any benefit in this automotive air-cycling. When the first copies rolled off the production line in Hambach, France, journalists en masse dipped their pens in the vinegar. ‘Two seats and a trunk that can barely fit a crate of beer; that will never work out’, almost the entire motoring press sneered at the time. And it must be said, it was on the edge. For a long time, the car was only bought for its high cuddliness factor and then, covered with company logos, served as a kind of mobile advertising column. (text continues below photo)

The high-flying plans to introduce the Smart as a transport concept for urban conglomerates were quickly abandoned. In 1999, Mercedes-Benz saw the need to increase its model range and acquired all shares of the colorful Swatch seller Hayek. After a difficult start, sales increased steadily, especially in Southern Europe. In a city like Rome the Smart became very popular, but as a concept the compact city flea simply came way too early and Mercedes never managed to make a profit with Smart. This despite the introduction of models such as the Smart coupe and roadster coupe and the larger Smart Fourfour.

One of the reasons was that Mercedes-Benz quite quickly felt called to – after the so-called elendtest debacle with the Mercedes A-class – also to equip the Smart with ESP. That made the car much too expensive. The brand seemed to die a silent death, until Mercedes-Benz entered into a joint venture with Geely in 2019. The Chinese would do the technology and Mercedes would do the design. New SUV-like Smarts were introduced, which share a lot of technology with sister models such as the Volvo EX30 and the Zeekr What followed was a painful parting in parts.

This week the German news magazine revealed Der Spiegel that Mercedes is ending production of the Smart Fortwo after more than 25 years. “The production of the current two-seater smart EQ fortwo coupe and convertible models will end at the end of March 2024,” a company spokeswoman told Reuters. Der Spiegel. Smart has built around 2 million two-seaters since 1998, most of them with combustion engines.

For the ForFour, the slightly larger brother of the two-seater with a length of 3.50 meters, it was already over at the end of 2021. According to Der Spiegel politicians are partly responsible for the fact that the affordable, electric small car has actually come to an end. The EU has adopted a new standard for automotive cybersecurity, which is difficult and expensive to implement in older models. Many models fail this hurdle this spring – in addition to the Smart, the Audi TT, the VW Multivan and the Porsche Boxster.

The employees of the Smart factory in Hambach do not have to fear for their jobs. The chemical giant Ineos took over the factory in December 2020. Irony of history: where the small, smart car that was way ahead of its time was born, Ineos now builds the Grenadier off-road vehicle. It weighs almost three tons, about two and a half times as much as the Smart.

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