Smart Roadster comeback on cards as brand expands line-up
The Roadster will be compact and a two-seater, pledges Smart's Europe CEO
Smart's Europe CEO hints at plans for a sports car revival and "rest assured, it will be very compact"
Smart is considering an electric revival of the Roadster sports car, which it made from 2002 to 2005, once it has launched a range of more mainstream electric cars.
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.
With that core line-up in place, 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 said that when he and his colleagues were planning the new Smart line-up in around 2020, when China's Geely acquired a 50% stake in the brand from parent company Mercedes-Benz, “there was one very wild colleague who had the first drawings of a new Roadster” – and the prospect of bringing it to reality hasn’t been written off.
“We have three great cars and none of them is a Roadster, but why not?” he said, when asked about the prospect of a comeback.
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. “If we do a Roadster, rest assured it will be very compact – for sure a two-seater,” he said.
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.
It would contrast markedly with the new #5 flagship, for example, which at 4.7m long and 1.7m tall is almost as big as a Land Rover Defender 110.
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. "Smart is always unconventional, and I think this is what we again have shown with the #5. Nobody expected that from us. Nobody expected the #1 from us, which is also for Smart a rather big SUV. Nobody expected a coupé [the #3] from us...
"But also if you look 20 years back, nobody expected the Crossblade," he added, referring to the outlandish speedster version of the Fortwo that Smart launched in 2002. "How could we dare to bring such a concept to the road?
"Smart is much more than the Fortwo," he said, hinting at the potential for a drastic expansion of the brand's line-up, which historically was largely centred around its core model.