Ah, the moment so many greenies have been waiting for: The EV version of the Smart two-seater is starting series production. Soon, you’ll be able to buy a city car fitted with a highly efficient lithium-ion battery and a 30 kW electric motor is fitted at the rear axle. As with all electric motors, it’s got lots of torque and all of it is available form essentially zero RPM. In the case of the electric Smart, that means 120 Newton meters of torque that are immediately available.

The smart fortwo electric drive is aimed at ease of use. It can be plugged into any normal household socket and charged the way you’d get juice into your iPod. And it’s cheap too. In Germany, for example at current exchange rates, a full charge costs around two Euros, or about three bucks. Once charged, you can get 115 kilometers of range (about 65 miles), which, as Smart puts it is “more than enough for city traffic.”

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It seems that Mercedes is insistent on making its diminutive Smart ForTwo city car better and better, and their latest announcement shows that the latest upgrades are ones that will make gearheads out there happy: More power and torque. But also being one of the darlings of the green set, the ForTwo also still maintains its impressive low emissions standards.

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BOOM! That sound you heard was Tesla getting vindication and Mercedes announcing what could be the most important automotive partnership in a very long time. Today, Daimler, parent company of Mercedes, announced that they have acquired a stake in Tesla motors, darling of the EV car set, and that they will also be exchanging technologies.

Is this the deal that will put electric vehicles on the map for real?

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Guess who just turned ten years old?

That’s right Smart - and hey, lookit that, it’s about the size of a ten year old too! I kid I kid - but seriously, these things are tiny.

Yet somehow, they’re still built like a Mercedes. They’re heavier than you’d think, and they’re remarkably safe for their size.

When I think back to when the Smart first came out, I recall that at first, they weren’t even going to be a Mercedes, they were actually conceived and nearly brought to market by Swatch, the people that make the watches. Turns out that never happened due to a number of factors, but Merc believed in the concept enough to continue it to fruition, and now the things are running around urban centers all over the world by the thousands.

Even here, in America, I’m starting to see more and more of them - although I have yet to see one on a freeway. Hey, there’s a story: Long road trip in a Smart.

Anyway, full press release after the jump celebrating Smart’s first decade.

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After years of rumors, speculations, and promised dates long past, Mercedes-Benz have finally begun to sell their popular Smart ForTwo here in the United States. And with a waiting list stretching longer than a year, drivers are not hesitating for their turn behind the wheel of this funky two-seater.

Even with the “right-now” popularity of this car coupled with the rising gas prices, I wanted to see if this little two-seater would be a good alternative to some of the bigger sub-compact cars in its price range. Continue Reading…

And the guys from Koenigseder answer a resounding “Jah!”

And they said there are no dumb questions … anyway, you knew this was bound to happen. Sooner or later, somebody, somewhere would take a Smart Car, and start to trick it out.

In this case, Koenigseder, from Austria, in case your wondering, flared fenders, lowered the ride height via Eibach springs and added 17-inch wheels (what are the size of the stock wheels on these? I swear they look like 12s). Not content with re-doing the outside, they decided to, uh, improve the interior as well with, among other things, floral decals.

We got more pictures after the jump, but even funnier is the translated press release from the Koenigseder site. Take it away Dieter: Continue Reading…