BMW and Mercedes-Benz are the second pair of automakers to confirm a partnership this week, after Ford and Volkswagen announced they will work together on utes and vans. The companies announced their intent to combine mobility divisions last year, but approval from anti-trust regulators has only just come through...
Mercedes-Benz has ordered €20 billion ($31 billion) worth of lithium-ion battery cells, which will see the company through until 2030. The German automaker expects battery-electric vehicles to account for between 15 and 25 per cent of its annual sales by 2025. To put that into context, the company sold a total of 3.3 million vehicles in 2017...
Smart will celebrate its 20th anniversary at the 2018 Paris motor show with the drop-top ForEase concept. Following in the footsteps of the crossblade and forspeed, the concept aims to offer passengers a "liberated and pure driving experience" by turfing the roof. There's no folding soft- or hard-top, it's just an old-fashioned speedster...
Brabus has revealed its latest take on the Smart ForTwo, in the form of the limited-edition 125R. Although power still comes from a three-cylinder turbocharged petrol engine, the boffins at Brabus have bumped outputs from 66kW and 135Nm to 93kW and 200Nm. The bump comes from a modified air intake, a new intercooler, and a recalibrated ECU...
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...
Dieter Zetsche, boss of Mercedes-Benz, has confirmed the Smart micro car brand will go all-electric in European markets by the end of the decade. Speaking at the company's annual shareholder's meeting, as reported by Carscoops, Daimler's little city car brand will only offer its electric vehicles (EV) in the coming years, following a similar move made in the North American market this year...
There are plenty of cars well suited to carting around the makings of a disco. Vans, for example, have plenty of space for the speakers, lights, smoke machines and equipment necessary for a big party. In a marketing tie-up with a product designer Konstantin Grcic, Smart took what was arguably the least-suited car for carting equipment around – the ForTwo – and turned it into the Mobile Disco...
Australia is one of the most diverse, fragmented automotive markets in the world. We have more brands to choose from than the US, where 15-times more vehicles are sold. Yet local product planners across the 60-plus car makers that sell their wares here regularly opt not to import and distribute certain models, usually citing a lack of projected demand or a difficult “business case” — code for “too bloody expensive”...
The Mercedes-AMG Project One hypercar might have stolen all the limelight at the Mercedes-Benz unveiling before the official opening of the 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show, but the diminutive Smart Vision EQ ForTwo is just as important to the future DNA of Daimler globally according to the man who should know...
Just days after being teased on social media, the Smart Vision EQ Fortwo concept has been revealed ahead of the Frankfurt motor show. Launching under parent Mercedes-Benz's new 'EQ' electric sub-brand, the Smart Vision EQ Fortwo show car measures a diminutive 2699mm long, 1720mm wide and 1535mm tall, and potentially previews the next-generation of the urban carmaker's smallest model, the Fortwo...
Smart has taken to social media to tease its upcoming concept bound for the Frankfurt motor show next month - an autonomous electric vehicle. Pitched as "the smart vision of urban mobility for tomorrow", not much is given away by the Mercedes-Benz micro car subsidiary other than the image of the vehicle's face posted on Instagram, which replaces the traditional front grille with a screen saying "on my way"...
