Smart #2 electric city car pictured testing ahead of October reveal
On sale Early 2027 Price from £21,000 (est)
With the new Smart #2, Smart is going back to its roots – and that feels like a bit of a risk.
You see, while some reviewers have criticised recent Smarts for being the antithesis of everything the brand had come to represent, we’d argue this shift in direction was a great thing.
Yes, the tiny city cars that Smart used to specialise in were very distinctive. But they were also impractical, uncomfortable and generally impossible to recommend.
By contrast, the Smart #1 – the first of the new generation of Smarts – was so good we named it the Best Small Electric SUV on sale at our 2024 awards. Meanwhile, at our 2026 awards, the bigger Smart #5 won Best Family Electric SUV.
It will be interesting, then, to see if the brand can successfully distil this newfound excellence into a much smaller model. And small the #2 will clearly be.
The production #2 has recently been spotted out testing and, while camouflaged, we can see it bears strong resemblance to the #2 concept that was revealed earlier this year (pictured below). It retains its "wheels-at-the-corners" stance and dinky footprint, measuring just 2792mm from nose to tail. That’s almost a metre shorter than our reigning Small Car of the Year, the Toyota Aygo X.
As a result, the #2’s turning circle is absolutely tiny: just 6.95m compared with the 9.4m of the Aygo X and 10.3m of our Small Electric Car of the Year, the Renault 5 (R5). This is possible because the #2 takes the same two-door, two-seat form as the old Smart Fortwo, whereas its rivals all have rear seats.
True, there are two-seat quadricycles like the Citroën Ami, but these models are glacially slow and don’t have to meet the same crash test standards as proper cars like the #2.
There’s no word yet on whether Smart will eventually offer a stretched, four-seater #2 alongside the two-seater, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
Similarly, Smart is yet to reveal the car’s interior, although it is promising it will be plusher and more luxuriously appointed than the sparsely furnished Fortwo. We understand you can expect liberal use of leather, as well as a mixture of translucent and gold surfaces.
As for the exterior, the concept’s design very much harks back to the Fortwo – albeit with modern Smart detailing, such as triangular headlights. Picture it without the light grey tyres and leather exterior door pulls, and you’ll have something pretty close to the production #2.
Interestingly, while Chinese brand Geely has been exclusively responsible for the engineering of Smart’s recent SUVs, it co-developed the mechanicals of the #2 with Mercedes; the two companies each own a 50% stake in Smart. This suggests we might see a future entry-level Mercedes that uses the same underpinnings.
Few technical details have been revealed, but Smart has confirmed that the #2 is fully electric and offers an official range of nearly 186 miles (300km). That doesn’t compare favourably with the R5 (which can manage up to 252 miles) or the Hyundai Inster (229 miles), although it is a big increase on the 84 miles of the old Fortwo EQ.
Smart also says a 10-80% charge of the #2’s battery will be possible in less than 20 minutes. Plus, it’s capable of vehicle-to-load (V2L) charging, meaning it can be used to power external devices – or top–up another electric car.
The production Smart #2 will be fully revealed at the Paris Motor Show in October this year. There have been no hints on pricing yet, but even with the promised premium interior, we’d be surprised if the starting point was much higher than £20,000. After all, the #2 is entering an increasingly competitive small electric car market, with models like the Honda Super N and Renault Twingo also on the way.
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