Germany's three major automakers, the BMW Group, Daimler (parent of Mercedes-Benz) and the Volkswagen Group, have been fined a total of €100 million ($163 million) for forming a cartel to buy certain steel products.
The Bundeskartellamt, Germany's competition commission, says the three car companies met twice a year with steel makers between 2004 and 2013 to set uniform surcharges for the long steel they purchased. Illegally set prices were in use until 2016.
Daimler has confirmed Smart will leave the US and Canadian markets by the end of the 2019, but the automaker will continue to provide support for existing cars through its Mercedes-Benz dealership network.
The German automaker told TechCrunch, "After much careful consideration, Smart will discontinue its battery-electric Smart EQ ForTwo model in the US and Canadian markets at the conclusion of MY2019".
Smart: 50 per cent stake could be sold to Geely - report
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Three sources have told The Financial Times Daimler, owner of Mercedes-Benz, is close to selling a 50 per cent stake in the Smart brand to Chinese automaker Geely.
A deal could be announced as soon as the Shanghai motor show, which takes place in the middle of April. If the sale goes ahead, it would fit both Smart's future vision for itself and Geely's acquisitive streak.
Smart has officially been around for 20 years. The city-car maker burst onto the scene in July 1998, with a two-seater (the inventively named ForTwo) measuring just over 2.5m long. More than 2.2 million examples have been sold since then, across 46 markets around the world.
Australia was one of them, but the little Smart didn't really fit into our big-car-centric culture, and so the brand was withdrawn from the market in 2015.
Mercedes-Benz’s Smart subsidiary has released the first series production cars in the group’s electrified EQ sub-brand.
The Smart EQ fortwo and forfour models premiered this week the night before the Geneva motor show, headlined by special ‘nightsky’ edition models, in black and blue.
Clearly tiny city cars are an ideal candidate to be electrified, with range limitations rarely an issue and global megacities becoming more and more equipped with charging sites.
