Way back in 2010 there was something of a battle between rival car firms BMW and Daimler as they aimed to enter the electric scooter market under the banners of their budget brands.
BMW was boldly showing its MINI-branded electric scooter concept and rival Smart had a similar-looking creation on show at the same time. Both models made their show debuts in Paris in October 2010, and both were surrounded with rumours that they’d lead to production bikes.
Two years later there was more news on both machines, but this time it was very different. The official word was that MINI wouldn’t be making its scooter, even though parent BMW was readying its own C Evolution. But Smart’s overlords at Daimler revealed that its concept was advancing to production, with a planned on-sale date of 2014.
Well, it’s 2016 now and you still can’t buy a Smart scooter. So what happened? The project seems to have foundered when Daimler’s development partner on the electric scooter, Vectrix, went bankrupt. That happened in 2014, at around the time the bike was initially expected to be ready for sale.
Is the project dead? Perhaps, but these newly-published patent images were filed with the European patent office in May 2014, two months after Vectrix closed. Registered under Daimler’s name, they show a bike that’s almost the same as the original concept but has enough changes to show it’s a different machine.
The original concept version from 2010. Note the single sided fork. Bodywork and swingarm are also changed for production model.
The styling is unchanged but the forks and rear swingarm are far more conventional than the concept version’s. The electric motor has also moved from inside the rear wheel to be mounted on the swingarm, and the instruments have been changed. Where there used to be an iPhone, there’s now a proper dashboard.
The delay between the images’ 2014 filing date and 2016 publication is not unusual. It’s often done to ensure that designs aren’t published before the products they patent are officially unveiled. That suggests the original plan would have seen the eScooter reach production before now. However, the fact that the project was still underway after Vectrix closed hints that it wasn’t instantly killed by that event, so could still be on the back-burner.
Electric scooters are slowly reaching a wider audience. They’re already massively successful in China and some major firms have also entered the market including Yamaha with the 2011 EC-03 and soon Honda with its planned EV-Cub, which is set to reach production soon.
These new images show that Smart might still be able to get in on electric bike scene. And if not, they show us what so very nearly reached showrooms.
