Smart Vision EQ ForTwo Concept May Be the Future of Car Sharing

Debuting at the 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show, the Smart Vision EQ ForTwo Concept aims to be the future of urban mobility.

The Vision EQ ForTwo is the first car from Daimler to adhere to its ‘CASE’ corporate strategy, which stands for Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric. It was designed from the ground-up for the purpose of car sharing, and thanks to its autonomous systems, will make hiring a car even easier than before. Users won’t have to go looking for a car-share ride, instead using their smartphone to summon the Vision EQ to come and pick them up. Vision EQ vehicles will also talk to one another and other autonomous cars on the road, theoretically transforming urban traffic into what Daimler calls “city flow.”

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The concept is powered by an electric motor and a 30 kWh lithium ion battery. When it’s not ferrying around city dwellers, it will drive itself to the nearest charging location and begin to load itself up with energy. The two-seater communicates with users through an LED display grille, while a special film applied to the windows allows information to be projected onto them from the inside. Without the need for traditional operating controls, a huge 24-inch screen could be applied to relay important info to the riders. Users can control the car via a smartphone app or through voice commands.

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Daimler envisions the urban mobility concept being used in its Car2Go car sharing program. The automaker says a car2go vehicle is hired somewhere in the world every 1.4 seconds and the car sharing service currently has over 2.6 million users worldwide. If or when the Vision EQ enters production, it will likely be rolled out across cities where Car2Go is currently active, allowing customers to order up a self-driving Smart instead of having to go and pick one up and drive it around themselves.

“The smart vision EQ fortwo is our vision of future urban mobility; it is the most radical car sharing concept car of all: fully autonomous, with maximum communication capabilities, friendly, comprehensively personalizable and, of course, electric,” says smart CEO Annette Winkler. “With the smart vision EQ fortwo, we are giving a face to the themes with which Mercedes-Benz Cars describes the vision of future mobility within the CASE strategy.”

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