This has allowed them to trade their small shared Smart car for black BMW X3s.
Until now, the lonesome three-cylinder on the U.S. market has been in the tiny Smart car.
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Only formidable marketing can overcome such barriers and create a profitable niche for the Smart car.
Another: consider a smart car with parental controls that could take the kids to school and return home.
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Schneider acknowledges the Smart Car fiasco hurt the company's credibility, but he swears electric vehicles are closer than we think.
The new Smart ad shows a giant SUV, which appears to be perched on top of a Smart car.
BMW's Mini and Daimler's Smart car, make fancy cars, not cheap ones.
It's Berlin, and I'm in a Smart car, DaimlerChrysler's tiny two-seater that has become a familiar sight in Europe's cramped city streets.
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Copying DaimlerChrysler's small two-seater Smart car seems to have become especially popular.
Things have been quiet in Smart car land this past year, as Mercedes has done its legwork to get Smart up to speed.
The driver of a Smart Car is ahead of his time, the Daimler-Benz mantra declares, and people want to be associated with environmentally friendly products.
The Smart car rolls out of the picture, to reveal that the SUV is sitting on top of the inner frame of a Smart car.
Mercedes-Benz assumed full control of Smart in 2011 from Penske and began tweaking the drivetrain and construction of the Smart car for a very different market.
By contrast, the colour of a Smart Car, made by DaimlerChrysler, is decided almost at the last minute, when plastic panels are clipped on to the sides.
The so-called Smart car venture is virtually being taken over by Daimler-Benz, Mercedes's parent, which has just increased its stake in the operation from 51% to 81%.
That way, when they travel between cities something better done via plane, train or bus, than in a tiny fortwo they will still have use of a smart car at their destination.
Daimler's own product portfolio already embraces the small and quirky Smart car, but there's also the executive icon the Mercedes Benz, the sporty, powerful derivative AMG and the rather pointless Maybach.
Pandora has long been the poster child of in-car compatibility, able to run on nearly every smart car platform known to man -- even quite a few that could only be called moderately intelligent.
But the 60-kilowatt electric motor and lithium-ion battery pack are coming to a Smart car near you soon, as the company introduces its first electric car the Fortwo Electric Drive for the 2013 model year.
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Beijing has already felt the heat about it from various car companies, and last year Daimler managed to stop another Chinese car firm, CMEC from making an electric car that closely resembled its ubiquitous Smart car.
So before I fast forward and talk about driving the forthcoming Smart Fortwo Electric Drive car through the cobble-stoned streets of Brooklyn, let me remind readers that the Smart car concept was quite literally ahead of its time.
The prospect of taking full advantage in the Smart car investment was right on time for Mercedes-Benz in the wake of the 2008 recession and new U.S. government standards for vehicles with high fuel economy that were enacted by C.
Designed primarily for city and suburban use, the new car will be smaller than a Smart car (three of them can fit into a single parking space), light (around 500 kilos), twice as efficient as an average car and will have the lowest emissions of any car in the same class.
Thejo: Automatic is a smartphone application and a tiny accessory which connects to any car on the road to make it a smart connected car.
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Did you ever stop to think how smart your car is?
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Smart was the first car in which the minimum became more appealing than the maximum.
Driving an early model Smart Fortwo in 2007 felt like driving a glass-encased moped, but the new Smart is decidedly more car.
If the charity is smart when putting the car on the market, it would advertise it as the car Joe Flacco won as Super Bowl MVP.
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As consumers are growing accustomed to having mobile Internet through their smart phones, more car buyers are seeking connectivity in their vehicles that will allow them to move seamlessly between their digital lives at work and home, panelists said.
In Brazil, Argentina, Russia and India, it has also opened or started building huge new factories to make its so-called world car, the smart and rugged little Palio.
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