Smart Once Made A Baby Jeep And It’s A Shame It Was Never Put Into Production

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Smart–a brand I love so much I named myself after its parent company–built cars that weren’t unrecognizable SUVs or city cars that polarize everyone who drives them. Back in the 2000s, Smart had big ideas for all of the kinds of vehicles it could scale down into something tiny. Back in 2005, Smart was eying the U.S. market and thinking of ways it could evolve its city car into something different. The company rolled into the Frankfurt Motor Show with the Smart Crosstown, a city car that looked like a baby Jeep, complete with a fold-down windshield.

Last week, a Bring a Trailer auction took me down a rabbit hole that I haven’t explored in a while. A dealership was selling a “2012 Smart Fortwo Edition by Jeremy Scott.” As I explained in great detail in that piece, that car should not exist. The dealership claimed that the car it was selling was a production car that was somehow built a full 11 months before the concept car and 15 months before Mercedes-Benz even announced the beginning of production. I reached out to Mercedes-Benz on it and representatives could not confirm its legitimacy. Well, the dealership wanted $37,000 for it and the highest bid was $8,250 before the auction closed without meeting the reserve. Ouch.

Doing the research for that article took me down a path that I haven’t walked down in a while, and it’s Smart’s ideas for the future, circa the mid-2000s.

To most people reading this site, Smart was an abysmal failure. The little second-generation Fortwo–which we got in 2008–looked cute but missed the mark on fuel economy and required premium fuel. Smart had a diesel engine on hand that returned 70 mpg in real-world driving conditions, but the American branch felt that would be too slow. Given the clarity of hindsight, maybe Americans would have been willing to sacrifice 0 to 60 mph times for better fuel economy.

Minimize To The Max

This story takes us to before that time and back to when Smart had a philosophy of “minimize to the max.” In 2005, Smart was riding on a wave of good sales and it even had three different models on the road. If you were a European city dweller, you could snatch up the Smart Fortwo. Back then, the Fortwo was still in its first generation, a car 8 inches shorter and a couple of inches narrower than the 106.1-inch second-generation that we got in America.

If you wanted to carry your friends with you in your Smart, you could have purchased the Forfour. This was not just a stretched Fortwo. Instead, it was largely a Mitsubishi Colt underneath, which meant that you could get it with a real manual transmission. That car was also built around a lounge concept where you could sit in the back and enjoy lunch, or spend a whole 24 hours in it like Top Gear did:

Smart’s best car at the time was arguably the Roadster, a Fortwo-based sportscar designed as a nod to the British roadsters of decades past. Basically, straight-line speed wasn’t its best attribute, instead, it handled great and was supposed to put a smile on your face. If you could stomach the slow shift speeds of Smart’s automated-manual transmissions, you could buy some of the most quirky cars that were on sale.

A Concept Hinting At Smart’s Possible Future

Sadly, Smart was burning billions in cash. The marque started selling its first cars in late 1997 and despite good sales numbers and positive reception to Smart’s designs, the company wasn’t turning a profit. As it turned out, “minimize to the max” wasn’t a cheap endeavor. However, that didn’t stop Smart and it kept looking at other vehicles to shrink down to pint-size. As I’ve written before, Smart decided to enter the U.S. market with a downscaled SUV called the Formore. At the same time, Smart was also considering bringing a possible replacement for the Fortwo to America. Motor Trend had a report on this at the 2005 Frankfurt Motor Show:

The patriotic young people hired to populate DaimlerChrysler’s smart stand wore t-shirts with the American flag highlighted by the caption, “smarts and stripes,” and images of little twofours in place of the stars. The smart division’s new chief, Ulrich Walker, says DaimlerChrysler will decide by the end of this year (early next year at the latest), whether it will bring the tiny cars to the U.S. “We’re looking at different sales distribution models,” Walker says. “We will only come to the U.S. if we can make money.” Walker says smart thinks it can do this with volumes of just 20,000 cars per year in the U.S. That would include the fortwo replacement, which will be designed to meet U.S. safety and emissions standards, just in case.

[Editor’s Note: I asked Mercedes (the person) about what the hell those chess piece/buttplug-looking white things are in the center of the dash (flanking the phone on the right top of the photo) and she told me that Mercedes (the company) didn’t ever explain. She said they seemed to be plugging the USB ports? But this was a 2005 concept, and USB ports in cars were still pretty uncommon. I guess this may remain a beautiful mystery. – JT]

One of Smart’s traditions is building concept cars that hint at future production designs. Look at a Smart concept and you might see the headlights or front-end design appear on a car in the near future. In 2005, Smart rolled out the Crosstown concept, a design study for a possible replacement for the Fortwo. At its heart, the Crosstown was similar to a Fortwo. It seats just two people and at 8.8 feet long, it’s just a few inches longer than the Fortwo that was already on sale. The Crosstown also featured Smart’s characteristic high-tensile steel tridion safety cell (the silver structure) and plastic panels, here painted in green. That is more or less where the similarities ended.

Like A Shrunken Jeep

One prominent feature of the Crosstown was how its body transformed. If you squint, the car already looked inspired by a Jeep, then also a product of DaimlerChrysler. With the push of a button, the Crosstown’s convertible top retracted all of the way to the rear of the vehicle, opening up the funky interior to the outside.

But it doesn’t stop there, as the front lid pops open. That’s where you’ll put the steeply-angled windscreen. Top-down and window stored? This car looks even more like a Jeep that shrunk in the wash. Smart never advertised this, but it looks like it wouldn’t have taken much effort to remove those doors, either.

The interior was even wilder. I’ll go over the rest in a moment, but just check out the translucent instrument cluster. Smart made two Crosstown vehicles and both have this epic cluster. Just gaze at the beauty of this thing, I need it in my life!

The use of translucent plastic continues with a central stereo system with ports for USB devices and PDAs. Sadly, Smart doesn’t say how a PDA would interact with this car, but it is neat to see how this sort of technology evolved into the connections that we have today for smartphones.

As for the rest of the interior, the Crosstown sports two seats that appear to have the same underlying frames as a Fortwo’s seats. These seats are supposed to look like used leather. Smart went with an urban theme for the Crosstown, adorning the dashboard, interior door panels, and seats with graffiti-like marks. Continuing with that theme, the pedals were modeled after mountain bike pedals and the gearshift is supposed to resemble a skateboard wheel.

What I love about this interior is that it doesn’t seem so far out that it couldn’t be made. It looks like something that a good customizer could do. Galpin Auto Sports, are you reading this?

Smart wasn’t just working on future cars during this time, but experimenting with different methods of propulsion. In 2005, Smart was experimenting with fully electric technology alongside diesel and natural gas. The Crosstown was another experiment. It paired Smart’s production gasoline engine with an electric motor to make a hybrid.

At the time, Ulrich Walker said that the Crosstown hybrid was 10 percent faster than a regular gas Smart and 15 percent more efficient, too. Smart has a thing for making functional concepts and this was no exception:

Dead Before Arrival

Unfortunately, history tells us that this design didn’t make it into production and few of its ideas trickled down into other models. Even back in 2005, Walker said that the hybrid system was just too costly to put into production.

Walker also reportedly felt that the global market had just enough room for just two Smart models. At the time, it was thought that those two models would be the Fortwo and the Forfour, but the Formore was still in development for America. So, it’s possible that we could have had a tiny car plus a small SUV. That future wouldn’t happen and Smart was liquidated in 2006, killing off all models but the Fortwo, which was given a second generation and introduced into the United States.

That’s a shame because weird stuff like this is what Smart was known for. Would it have sold well? I’m not sure, but it would have been fun, which is what a Smart is supposed to be.

Some of Smart’s past design ideas did carry over to the new Fortwo. The central HVAC system stack of the second-generation Fortwo resembles the one found in the Crosstown concept. The Fortwo also got the central button bank setup that was in the first Smart Forfour and in the Crosstown.

Still, I like to think what would have happened if Smart were a bit healthier and thus was perhaps able to bring at least some of the Crosstown to life. I would love to roll around without a windshield with the wind blowing around my hair and goggles.

(Photos: Smart)

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