Smart models

Smart was created in the 1990s from an unlikely partnership between the watchmaker Swatch and Mercedes-Benz, around the idea of a tiny, clever city car. The 'Swatch Mercedes Art' concept gave the brand its name. The company was established around 1994, and the first Fortwo went on sale at the end of the decade.

The whole concept was built around one radical product: a two-seat car barely over two and a half metres long, designed to dart through traffic and park nose-in to the kerb where normal cars couldn't fit. Nothing else on the market was quite so single-minded about urban size.

Smart struggled for years to make money from such a narrow idea, and it has now reinvented itself as an electric brand through a joint venture between Mercedes-Benz and China's Geely, moving toward larger electric models. For buyers, smart has always been about the city and nothing else: tiny size, easy parking, and low running costs, traded against space, range, and long-distance comfort. It is a specialist tool for dense urban life.