Smart Formore: Ahead of its time

Updated




SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles) are greatly in fashion.
These latter-day off-roaders may look slightly bizarre in an urban setting, but their lofty driving position and associated sense of enhanced personal safety have made them the bestselling segment in the motor market over the last couple of years.

The slightly bitter image of the incongruous, gas-guzzling monstrosity will linger for some years to come in the shape of the BMW X6 and the Audi Q7, but in the meantime, the overall concept has been considerably trimmed back so that we now have compact SUVs such as the VW Tiguan, Toyota RAV 4 and Ford Kuga to offer an alternative to the compact class – one that is suitable for the mass market, satisfies environmental criteria and is affordable for the average earner.
And that the aforementioned average earner is already jumping aboard this particular bandwagon is more than apparent from the sales figures for compact SUVs.

Any manufacturer that does not currently have an SUV as part of their portfolio either has one in the pipeline or has missed out on a profitable trend.

Smart seem to have got the jump on everyone else back in 2003 when they commenced work on their mini SUV, which was to join the Roadster Fortwo and the Forfour to secure the future of the marque .
Yet Smart went deeply into the red, which caused Daimler-Chrysler to pull the plug on both the Smart Roadster and the Forfour.

Unofficial sources within the company suggest that the development of the Formore (as the Smart SUV was to be known) was stopped in December 2004.
And this was at a point in time when the vehicle was as good as market ready: the Daimler-Chrysler board obviously had no faith in the prospects for this vehicle concept – just one year before the SUV really came into its own!

With hindsight, the idea of an SUV in the small car segment was way ahead of its time and anticipated the trend that we have witnessed over the past few years.
So it seems that in December 2004, Daimler Chrysler threw away the chance of making the Smart brand profitable and establishing it as a frontrunner in the emergence of the SUV.

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