Electric Smart Car Finally Coming to the United States

Reader Contribution by Seth Leitman

An electric version of the Smart ForTwo is coming to America. This fully electric powered Smart car has a 30 kW drive motor and 16.5 kWh lithium-ion battery. Using a standard 220-volt outlet, it takes only three and a half hours to charge the battery from 20 to 80 percent of its capacity and less than eight hours to fully charge it. The battery can also be charged using a common household 110-volt outlet. The vehicles can reach highway speeds and offer a range of 82 miles on a single charge.

Smart will launch a fleet of only 250 of the electric cars in the U.S. in October 2010. By 2012, Smart expects to have the car available for sale.

If you are interested in this car, you can learn more or even sign up for the reservation list on the Smart Electric Drive page.

Ironically, when the company conceived the Smart car concept more than 20 years ago, Daimler developers anticipated the need for an alternative powertrain and factored the integration of electric drive components.

Here’s a chart from Smart showing the differences between the first and second generations of its electric drive:

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