New smart ForTwo Model Ready For Sale

FRANKFURT, March 5, 2006; Reuters reported that the successor to the two-seater Smart ForTwo city car should be on sale in April 2007, a spokesman for the DaimlerChrysler (DCXGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) unit said on Sunday.

Smart had not previously said when exactly in 2007 the new model would appear. The spokesman denied a report due to appear in German news magazine Focus on Monday, which said the launch was being brought forward from autumn to spring to minimise the time the old model was on sale with a new model pending.

The current Smart ForTwo has been on the market since 1998, but never reached hoped-for sales of 200,000 units per year. Smart has lost DaimlerChrysler billions of euros and DaimlerChrysler has given the unit a deadline of 2007 to be profitable.

DaimlerChrysler is also trying to get approval for the new Smart model in the United States, where it hopes to sell 20,000 units a year. The current model, one of the smallest cars on European roads, is banned in the United States on technical grounds.