At the Beijing Motor Show, Smart unveiled the concept that matters most to its renaissance under new German-Chinese ownership: the #2.

Will the successor make an impact just as quirky, revolutionary, and safe as the legendary original, or has modern reality overruled the formula? We find out in Rome, where the concept version hit European soil and offered a sneak peek of the interior.   

Rome is far from an arbitrary choice for the city that tried to disrupt mobility just before the century turned. In the buzzing capital, with its narrow streets, impossible parking, and congested traffic, Smart feels at home.

Flocks of the original Mercedes-made version still roam the center and its surroundings. In Italy alone, almost 600,000 Smarts have been sold since 1998, and around 90 percent of them are still in use. The Italians adore city cars, especially the Smart. 

Niche use case

Worldwide, more than two million examples of the early Smart generations are still on the road today. That is not just a fun statistic. It is Smart’s entire argument in one sentence. Still, longtime steward Mercedes, which now shares ownership with Geely, has consistently struggled to become profitable.

From the cool showroom towers to four-door versions, Smart is also an example of how a good idea doesn’t automatically turn into cash flow, especially in the lower segments of the car market. 

Italy might well be a romantic billboard for the two-seater, but it was also a confinement. Due to its unfavorable price sticker and niche use case, adoption in other parts of Europe never reached the desired output. And now, reborn Smart tries to steal a few chapters from Mini’s playbook. 

260 units

The #1, #3, and #5 – all made in China – are credible electric cars. But they are also crossovers that compete on crossover terms with their size, their range, and their space.

Honestly, so far, they haven’t been living up to their commercial expectations. In Belgium, the brand only sold 260 units in 2026. Just a little more than Alpine, but that is a sports car brand.

Talking about Renault. If the retro formula has worked for the French car maker, then the #2 might shake up those sales statistics.

Mercedes is still fully responsible for the microcar’s design. Exterior designer Mohamed Hussein Aliyeh asks us a rhetorical question when presenting his brainchild: “Why should cities adapt to cars when cars can adapt to cities?”

Personal accessory

He then explained what his team found when they went back to study the original Fortwo. “The Smart was never simply a car. In dense urban environments, it functioned almost like a personal accessory. It transported people and belongings, but it also became part of a lifestyle.” From that conclusion came the design brief: function becomes fashion.

The result will be a car that reads immediately as a Smart (thanks to a compact body, pronounced wheel arches, and wheels pushed hard to the corners), but with layered textures, translucent surfaces, and an exterior display that can show messages or visual information.

The proportions are friendly rather than aggressive, deliberately so. Aliyeh describes the design language as built around three words: love, pure, and unexpected.

Sturdier than the original

Such keywords are easier to juggle than to translate into bodywork, but walking through the concept in person, the #2 comes through. The car is sturdier than the original, doesn’t intimidate, and nods excessively to its predecessor.

The fact that it is wide – and then some other technical choices – reveals that the new underpinnings will further serve a family of larger cars.

Beijing already showed the outside, but Rome adds the inside. And that, too,o is a place where the #2 goes back to its roots. “Every original Smart owner will tell you the same thing about the Fortwo: it was inexplicably spacious inside. The #2 intends to recreate that specific feeling”, says enthusiastic Christoph Diefenmeier of Mercedes-Benz Design.

Wave form

The approach looks and feels very premium, not on par with a car at the entry level of the market, but much more than decorative. The dashboard runs as a single, continuous waveform across the full width of the cabin, seeking to dissolve the boundary between driver and passenger. 

This time too, the effect is that the interior reads as larger than the exterior dimensions could logically permit. The foldable armrest in the middle creates a seating style that looks like a single bench rather than two separate units. Cozy, but as we tried it, you don’t feel crammed in.

The passengers look at vents styled like turbines. Integrated storage solutions are woven into the design language rather than applied as afterthoughts. Diefenmeier describes the interior design goal as “simplicity without feeling simplistic.” The preview remains under cover, though, until the show car reaches Paris.

A new platform

Under that flashy interior sits the ECA architecture, short for Electric Compact Architecture. Smart claims it was developed specifically for the #2, but as mentioned, its role will supersede that destination. Betting on a new ForFour, or rather #4, isn’t wild guessing.

It also appears in the technical choices. The complexity of a comfort-oriented five-link in the rear is a stretch for the microcar category, but it makes sense if the investment is scaled across other models. 

A five-link also points to good road holding. As for set-up, head of engineering Timo Weide claims that European road conditions were “integrated into the project from the outset”.

He continues: “The vehicle has been developed to cope with German autobahns, Roman cobblestone streets, Alpine mountain roads, and Scandinavian winter conditions.” Suddenly, that’s a lot more than strolling around city centers, and one might wonder whether Smart buyers are interested in higher-speed adventures or have an appetite for cornering.

300 kilometers of range

For us, the platform’s headline figure is a turning circle of under 7 meters (6.9 meters), which matches that of the last generation of the Smart EQ Fortwo. That is the benchmark this car needs to hit for city use. And it hits it.

Battery capacity is 35.7 kWh, with an estimated WLTP range of roughly 300 kilometers, and a fast-charging time from 10-80% in around 20 minutes. Details on the chemistry remain undisclosed. Weide, so far, unveils that it matches the car’s positioning.

“We’re in the A-segment”, he says. Though Chinese battery manufacturers are starting to adopt sodium-ion and semi-solid state, Geely’s in-house solution for mass-market models is the Aegis Short Blade battery with LFP cells.

Another important transfer from the original is the Tridion safety cell. This is a core structure comparable to a racing car’s rolling cage. Where in regular car design crumple zones front and rear absorb the impact, the Smart is too small for those ‘cushions’, so it needs a reinforced passenger cell which acts like a shell.

Paris in October

Smart has been running prototypes for over a year now. And none of what was shown in Rome is final. Smart is calling this a concept, and it clearly is. But it already sketches the lines and details that will be fully unveiled when the production version debuts at the Paris Motor Show in October.

It’s a thumbs-up that the #2 is not just a smaller version of a larger car. But times have changed, too. Europe is in full preparation for its E-car, literally rewriting the playbook for electric city cars. Suddenly, the #2 might face a whole new field of competitors with price tags that are likely to undershoot the Smart by a fair margin. Made in China might not benefit its stakeholders.