Smart #2: Mercedes and Geely Bring Back the Tiny Two-Seater, This Time as a 300 km Electric City Car
The Smart brand built its name on a car barely longer than a parking space. Now, after cancelling the Fortwo in 2024, the Mercedes-Benz and Geely joint venture is bringing that idea back as an EV. The Smart #2 completed its regulatory filing in China on August 7, which means the production car's design and headline specs are now public, months ahead of its planned world premiere at the Paris Motor Show in October.
The filing with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) confirms the #2 as an all-electric, two-seat city car built by Geely's Zhejiang Haoqing Automobile Manufacturing. It measures 2,751 to 2,764 mm long, 1,669 mm wide, and 1,555 mm tall, with a wheelbase of just 1,875 mm. Curb weight comes in at 1,130 kg. For comparison, the old Fortwo that ended production two years ago stretched 2,695 mm, so the newcomer is bigger, but still small enough to slot into the kind of gaps a crossover simply can't.
Power comes from a 60 kW (80 hp) motor built by Geely's InfiMotion unit. Top speed is 140 km/h, which is honest about the car's job: this is not a highway cruiser, it's an errand-runner engineered for tight streets and cramped parking. The battery is lithium iron phosphate (LFP), with cells supplied by CATL and the pack assembled by Geely's Energee.
A Return to Roots After a Detour Into Bigger Cars
The name Smart arrived in 1998 as a joint venture between Swatch and Mercedes-Benz, and the first Fortwo rolled out of a factory in Hambach, France, that same year. The formula was unusual: a two-seater barely 2.5 meters long that could park nose-in against a curb, with a safety cell called the tridion that kept the tiny cabin surprisingly strong. Over two generations, Smart sold more than 2 million of the little cars before production wound down — the Fortwo was cancelled entirely in 2024, and the Hambach plant eventually passed to Ineos.
Smart's modern era started in 2020, when Mercedes and Geely formed a 50-50 joint venture headquartered in Ningbo, Zhejiang province. The revived brand spent its first years selling a lineup of crossovers — the #1, #3, and #5 — plus a plug-in hybrid sedan called the #6. Sales in China told a blunt story: Smart sold just 29,986 vehicles there in 2025, and reports surfaced of dealers moving unsold stock through used-car channels at deep discounts.
The #2 is the company's answer to that. It revives the two-seat formula that made the original brand famous, on a new bespoke platform Smart calls the Electric Compact Architecture (ECA). The concept version, unveiled in Beijing in April, showed the design language: teardrop lamps, a floating roof, and a cabin with a bench seat and an S-shaped dashboard that nods to the original Fortwo. The production car keeps the essentials, minus the show car's white tires and polished gold accents.
Smart has been teasing the car through street murals painted in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Paris, and Shanghai, with local artists including Martín Ron, Georgia Laurie, and Zhu Bin. A mural in Melbourne, painted by Laurie, anchored the brand's Australian push. Kang Yi, Smart's global CMO, called the #2 "the evolution of a revolution" in a statement tied to the campaign.
Specs That Fit the City Brief
The early numbers line up with the mission. Smart targets a WLTP range around 300 km from the 35.7 kWh pack — roughly double what the last Fortwo Electric Drive managed — and claims a 10-to-80 percent DC fast charge in under 20 minutes. The turning circle is 6.95 meters curb to curb, which matters more than horsepower in the markets this car is aimed at. The MIIT filing also lists a closed grille with vertical air curtains, 15- and 16-inch wheel options, and the choice of a black, body-colored, or hard roof.
The filing is a routine step in China's type-approval process, but it pulls back the curtain early. MIIT publishes every new model submitted for sale approval, so automakers often find their designs revealed before their own launch events. That is exactly what happened here. Smart had planned to unveil the #2 at the Paris show on October 12; the Chinese paperwork beat them to it by two months.
Produced in China, Sold Almost Everywhere Except the US
The #2 will be built in China and sold there, in Europe, and in other overseas markets. The US is the notable exception. Tariffs that quadrupled duties on Chinese-built EVs to 100 percent, followed by software restrictions that have already pushed models like the Polestar 4 out of the American market, mean the car is effectively barred from the biggest premium-car market on Earth. Electrek framed the filing as "China's getting a new Smart car and you can't have it" — a line that captures the wider standoff over Chinese EV imports.
That standoff matters beyond Smart. The US market is the one place Chinese automakers cannot reach with built-in-China EVs, and the gap shows in the products Americans can buy: sub-$30,000 electric city cars barely exist there, while Chinese brands churn out affordable compacts for domestic and European buyers. Smart's own history in the US is thin — the original Fortwo sold there until 2019 in small volumes — but the new #2 would have been a natural fit for dense coastal cities. Instead, the company will focus on China and Europe, where small EVs still get a hearing.
What the Return of the Two-Seater Means for the EV Market
The city-car segment has been quietly shrinking in most of the world. Buyers keep moving up to crossovers, and the small hatchback has become an endangered species in showrooms. Smart's bet is that electrification changes the math. A battery-electric city car can be cheap to run, easy to park, and genuinely useful for the daily grind — 300 km of range covers a week of urban driving for most people, and a 20-minute fast charge handles the occasional longer trip.
There is precedent for the rebound. The Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, a $5,000-class two-door city car from China's SAIC-GM-Wuling joint venture, became one of the best-selling EVs in the world at its peak, proving demand for tiny electric runabouts is real. The Smart #2 is a far more premium answer to the same question — call it the upmarket end of the micro-car revival, priced somewhere around €20,000 according to early reports.
The Paris debut in October should fill in the remaining blanks: interior images, final pricing, and the launch-market list. Delivery timelines point to 2027, which puts the #2 in a small but growing field of new small EVs, from the revived Renault Twingo to the upcoming Fiat Panda-based city car. Malaysia's Proton, which represents Smart through its Pro-Net distribution arm, could offer the #2 as a premium alternative to its own eMas 5 electric hatchback, giving the brand a Southeast Asian beachhead.
Smart's revival gamble is simple: the car that made the brand famous was small, and small is coming back into fashion. The difference is that this time, the tiny two-seater is electric, Chinese-built, and aimed at a market that has spent two decades learning to love crossovers. Whether enough city drivers still want a 2.75-meter car is the open question. The order books will start answering it next year.
For more on electric vehicles and the broader market, see our EV coverage. Related reading: AI coverage and Battery Tech for the cell technology behind the #2's LFP pack.
Sources: CnEVPost on the MIIT filing, Electrek on the regulatory leak, Electric Cars Report on the mural reveal, and paultan.org on the Malaysian market angle.
