Commercial flop, Smart #1 launches a cheaper version
This page is translated from the original post "Flop commercial, la Smart #1 lance une version moins chère" in French.
- 17/10/2023 11:38
The idea of breaking the micro city car concept to create an electric SUV collided with the harsh realities for Smart and its #1 model.
This was clearly not a brilliant idea, and it is credited to the new owner of the manufacturer Smart, the Chinese giant Geely. The vehicle, initially recognized as a micro city car queen of parking and weaving through congested traffic, has become an expensive, unremarkable compact SUV.
The boomerang effect is immediate: customer diversion and plummeting sales. Smart is now trying to respond with a time-honored tactic: devalue its product to lower the price. Hoping that customers will be sensitive to that. But it rarely works.
Smart is therefore launching in Germany, initially, a Pro trim offered at a price of 37,490 euros, about 4,000 euros less than the current entry-level Pro+ version priced at 41,315 euros in France, before a 5,000 euro ecological bonus. If we project forward, this would mean that this Smart #1 Pro would drop to about 32,500 euros in our country upon its spring 2024 launch.
But the trick lies in using a lower-capacity battery: 49 kWh versus 66 kWh for the initial model. This results in a net loss of autonomy of about 100 km. In its marketing pitch, Smart explains that a city car with a theoretical range of 320 km (roughly 250 km in real-world conditions) is more than sufficient.
The problem is, the #1 is no longer a city car… The second problem is that its Chinese production should exclude it from the French ecological bonus program in 2024. Smart therefore checks none of the boxes: a product with total diminishing interest in terms of range and offshored production from France to China. If you want to drive electric, Chinese and cheap, a MG is much more suitable and 10,000 euros cheaper. Or consider the Smart #1’s cousin, now also Chinese, the Volvo EX30 with identical mechanics and price.
We hardly see many Smart #1 on our roads, and that is unlikely to change.
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