The new Smart generation is available in our country too. Within a few years the entire range will be electric only, as the brand looks ahead to autonomous-driving car sharing.
The world's best-known city car will be electric only. From 2022, in fact, Smart's production will be completely converted to battery power. Electric models are already available today: the smart fortwo, the smart fortwo cabrio and the forfour.
Completely renewed in its look as well, the little city car comes to market with a sportier model too, making Smart the first brand to offer within its range both models with an internal combustion engine and models that are fully battery-electric.
The price list for the Italian market starts at €23,800 for the fortwo and €24,550 for the forfour. The German manufacturer also offers a trade-in for customers switching from a diesel car to an electric one. It provides an incentive of €2,440 for Euro 4 vehicles, while for lower-category cars it guarantees the vehicle's value. All models come as standard with a new on-board charger. In the US and in Great Britain the charging time is 2.5 hours, half that of the previous model. In addition, the "smart control" app allows users to monitor charging remotely and activate various functions, such as smart charging or pre-conditioning.
But at the Frankfurt Motor Show Smart goes beyond electric drive, unveiling a concept that looks to the future: the smart vision EQ fortwo. "Smart vision EQ fortwo is our vision of the urban mobility of the future and represents the most radical car-sharing prototype of all: fully autonomous, extremely communicative, friendly, highly customisable and of course electric," was how Annette Winkler, head of Smart, presented it. "With the smart vision EQ fortwo we put a face to the topics that Mercedes-Benz Cars uses in its Case strategy to describe how it envisions future mobility." A self-driving, networked and shared-mobility car. And naturally electric.
Despite a study by Quattroruote having recently shown that car-sharing companies are operating at a loss, at least in our country, Smart forecasts that by 2025 the number of car-sharing users worldwide will quintuple, reaching 36.7 million.
Car2go was one of the first services to invent free-floating rental: the car does not have to be collected from or returned to fixed stations, but can instead be picked up and dropped off anywhere within the area covered by the service. Now, however, the car-sharing concept is evolving, because users will no longer have to search for the nearest available car — the car will find them and come to pick them up directly at the desired location. It may even anticipate the need for a rental, given that the vehicles are practically always on the move. Traffic volumes and the surface area devoted to parking in urban areas will thus be drastically reduced.