The Actually Small Smart Car Is Coming Back Next Year

It’s unusual for a car company to be so closely associated with a single model that it becomes its entire identity, but that’s the case with Smart. The company’s little egg-shaped city car may have officially worn the names City Coupe and Fortwo, but ask anyone in the street to identify one, and they’ll more likely than not simply call it a ‘Smart Car’.

The tiny little rear-engined two seater was the brand’s bread and butter from its launch as a Mercedes subsidiary in 1997, but in 2024, it was discontinued as Smart entered the age of its Geely-Mercedes co-ownership and started to move into bigger, more generic EV crossovers (which, hilariously for the company that once built the Fortwo, have up to 637bhp).

Next year, though, the company is returning to its roots with a new all-electric two-seater city car in the image of the model that made its name. In line with Smart’s new naming convention, it’ll be called the #2 (pronounced ‘Hashtag Two’ – we know, sigh).

It’s being styled by the design team at Mercedes, but it’ll be produced in China by Geely. The brand, however, calls Europe a key market. European CEO Dirk Adelmann said: “The confirmation of our Project Two and the upcoming launch of the Smart #2 marks a milestone moment for the smart brand on a global scale. The Smart #2 will shape a new era of individual urban automobility, especially in classic Smart cities like Rome, London or Paris.”

The teaser images of the car’s shadow show that it’ll stick to the slightly more conventional two-box silhouette of the third-generation Fortwo rather than the distinctive sloping front look of the first two, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see it adopt the family look of the new, bigger Smarts, with slender LED lightbars linking the lights at both ends.

A full launch is planned next year, where it’ll be one of three new EVs introduced by the brand in the next three years. Now, if Smart’s revisiting its past models, pretty please, can we have a new Roadster too?