If you call your new car Smart #1 (pronounced “hashtag one”), you deserve to be ridiculed. But on the other hand, we also understand. Smart has been losing tons of money for 28 years. This may be the last attempt at making some more of the brand, so bring on those empty marketing terms. Perhaps the buying public is listening now.
Smart has been a burden on Mercedes for almost thirty years. The mini-brand loses millions every year and has never really been able to break the bank with its small Smart ForTwo. While the idea behind Smart is quite good: hip, handy carts that would bring about a change in urban mobility. There would be trendy Smart centers in cities, with trendy sellers, trendy accessories and trendy sets of body panels, with which you could give your trendy Smart a different trendy color every month.
Mercedes handed over the loss-making Smart to Geely
Unfortunately, the hip city crowd didn’t want it. The only way to keep Smart going a bit was to partner with Renault. The ForTwo and ForFour from 2014 are subcutaneously similar to the Renault Twingo. But hey, that didn’t help either. And in 2019 Mercedes was tired of the huge losses. Smart was partly transferred to the Chinese Geely – which also owns Volvo and Lotus – and should focus on electric cars. No, wait… Smart can say that for itself, because the brand says it will become “one of the main producers for premium electric cars”.
Smart #1 has a hashtag because it’s ‘trend-setting’
This Smart #1 should take care of that. It was designed by Mercedes, but in our view it is very similar to the Opel Adam. Either way, the #1 is going to be a trendsetter, according to Smart. “With the combination of the # symbol and a number, Smart has defined a recognizable family name for its new generation of electric vehicles. The # symbol is used on social media to indicate the ‘hottest topics’ and thus stands for ‘trendsetting’ in the digital age, which is appropriate, because Smart has been innovating since 1997 and remains a trendsetter in the automotive industry.”
Compact electric SUV enters a crowded market
Anyway, if we cut through the empty marketing nonsense, we just see a compact electric SUV, like there are so many now. Smart is still silent about the specifications of the #1. We only know that the car has a favorable Cw value of 0.29 and therefore smoothly cuts through the air. Maybe Smart should just let go of the idea of ​​innovation and trendsetter. The original ForTwo – then called Smart City Coupé – was perhaps too progressive and not what people were waiting for. So build a good electric SUV and get rid of all that hip bullshit.