Mercedes Takes Over Smart Brand from Penske, Four Door Cancelled

The problem with the smart brand is that they need more product. I know Daimler tried different variants (smart forfour & roadster) and the fortwo is basically the only one that's successful.

However, they need different variants that offer slightly more versatility - especially in North America and even Europe as well. With the Fiat 500 coming soon for a similar price point that offers more versatility and good crast test ratings (according to Euro NCAP) - the smart fortwo becomes completely redundant.

While a Nissan based 4-dr doesn't sound like a good idea to me because it basically goes against everything the smart brand is - they definitely need more variants like that in order to increase demand.

Never considered one anyway

If it weren't for CAFE and Co2 regs Mercedes would have shut this brand down years ago. If you are not going to address the car's faults, why bother keeping it on life support?

@throwback:

Because it probably costs next to nothing to maintain, and as you stated yourself, they have to meet CAFE regulations. The smart cars will handily offset their AMG cars. Wonderful that we end up paying so that manufacturers can work around nonsensical government regulation.

Why can't they go regulate something that actually means something, like speculating on oil futures without taking delivery?

USA version: only gas no diesel, low tq/hp, average mileage, clunky transmission. It's like they didn't want it to actually succeed.

Not sure where most of you live, but here in sunny SoCal they are plentiful enough. Certainly not to be confused with a major force on the roads, but around nonetheless.

A relative has one to get to and from their business in the city, instead of the big SUV they already own. They LOVE the thing. It's like a motorcycle to them, in that it's small, nimble, and returns much better economy than 95% of the cars on the road.

Having played with the thing myself, I feel that the "fun factor" actually DOES balance out many of the shortcomings. The transmission is not great, however, there's a trick to driving it with the manu-matic mode that actually results in some great performance (all things considered).

Anyone who thinks that a $13,000 micro car is going to be everything to all people simply doesn't get it.

I see between 1 and 4 Smart cars in the Columbus, OH area every day. Although I have no interest in personally owning one, I find them interesting in a quirky way.

In the last few days have had my first sighting of the new Passat on the road. It was in black.

What is Dieter Zetsche doing? Smart is the definition of how NOT to run a car company. The car has 1 platform that is unsharable to other vehicles, built by itself in one very large and expensive plant. The car has terrible driving dynamics, shifts horribly, poor fuel economy and the unshakable stigma of "death trap" from the general public.

They touted a "face lift" for 2011...what did they do? Switched the dash layout around and offered an optional touch screen navigation system that is garbage and doesnt even work unless the car is in park and shuts the music off when the nav is yelling at you in pseudo German-English.

FAIL FAIL FAIL

How to repair it? Well first of all, you didnt need to form an alliance with Nissan to get a platform for the thing as you already have the new B platform (and variants) which will have 4-6 cars based on it (including the new A-class). Your SOHC 1970's tech 2.0L 4cylinder from the B200 sucks, so you'll need engines from someone else..or I hope you already have a new line of 4 cylinders for the B-cars in development, use that (I'd suggest a turbocharged and direct injected 3 cyl but its clear you want to spend as little as possible on this, so put a 4 cylinder in it that doesnt require trips to redline in every gear just to keep up with traffic). Then build other cars in the same plant to use up capacity and share costs.

Fully electric cars are a joke and still years away until they see viability, so forget that angle..Once the tree huggers buy theirs and the gov't pulls the incentives you'll be in the same boat you are in now.

Spread the costs across the board with other MB or Nissan cars and for gods sake, build a competitive product when you do.

xorbe says:
08:41 AM, 02/15/11
USA version: only gas no diesel, low tq/hp, average mileage, clunky transmission. It's like they didn't want it to actually succeed.

Yup and why buy this car, when you can get almost as good MPG with a Cruze eco and Fiesta SFE? Those cars are almost much more substantial with good engines and transmissions. The only advantage of the smart is being to able to fit in small parallel parking spaces.