The first SUV from Smart will reinvent the brand

The arrival of a SUV from Smart was something to be expected; only the brand’s orientation toward a very specific market, that of city cars, could have made what now seemed and would be inevitable possible.

But it was in 2012 that the Daimler-owned firm presented at the stylish Paris Motor Show a prototype in which what would become the new look of the Smart models to be built from then on converged, under a more or less revolutionary design language based on a sporty coupé but with reminiscences of off-road vehicles.

The smart forstars Concept, which illustrates this article, was born as a SUC: Sport Utility Coupé, a bet on blending, not without difficulty, the structural features of a city car, a sports car and a crossover.

Furthermore, this Smart SUV was presented as an electric car, anticipating the brand’s upcoming introduction among vehicles that rely exclusively on electricity as the main source for all their systems.

The prototype did not end up in the drawer of discarded projects because, with increasingly restrictive environmental regulations and the proliferation and rising trend in SUV sales, the arrival of an electric SUV from Smart was part of the firm’s plans, which, throughout 2019, declared a deep crisis that led to the partial sale of the brand’s shares to the Chinese investment group Geely, a giant where names and heavyweights of the automotive industry such as Volvo or Lotus already appear, whose plans for Smart seemed set to take the reins of this manufacturer once the agreement was signed.

The new Smart SUV will arrive in 2022

According to our colleagues at Motori On line, the new Smart SUV will, like the rest of the range, feature electric powertrains, and will arrive at the end of 2022.

A car that should be built on the new manufacturing platform that Smart has for its electrified vehicles. This means the crossover would have an electric setup whose battery would have a storage capacity of 78 kWh, which, in principle, should allow a range of about 400 km.