Smart is considering an electric revival of the Roadster sports car, which it made from 2002 to 2005.
The brand now sells the #1 and #3 SUVs in Europe and will bring the larger #5 SUV to the market next year while it works to enhance the viability of an electric city car to replace the Fortwo – for which, the firm says, it would need to share a platform with another manufacturer.
The brand could start to shift focus to more enthusiast-minded, low-volume propositions and Smart Europe CEO Dirk Adelmann has told Autocar a resurrection of the diminutive Roadster sports car is one possibility.
Adelmann had a Roadster as his first company car so has a “very emotional relationship with that vehicle” and pledged that any EV successor would be true to the original’s spirit.
The brand’s current line-up is SUV-focused, but launching an EV sports car with a comparable footprint to the original Roadster – which was just 3.4m long and 1.2m tall – would go some way to taking Smart back to its roots as a purveyor of characterful and ultra-compact cars for urban environments.
But Adelmann told Autocar the brand’s positioning is less related to the size of its cars and more about their unique design and positioning.
