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" With the BMW i3 and Renault&amp;#039;s quirky Twizy grabbing the world&amp;#039;s city-car attention, you could be forgiven for thinking Smart was slipping off the face of the Earth. And you could be forgiven for not letting that bother you at all. But Smart will show the first clue to its bounce-back strategy by unveiling the Fourjoy concept car at the Frankfurt Motor Show next Monday. The all-electric Fourjoy is be a four-seat, four-door concept that will mark Smart&amp;#039;s move into the world of the grown ups. That won&amp;#039;t spell the end of the two-door Fortwo as we know it, because Smart plans to replace its baby car with a model sharing styling similar to the Fourjoy, but it will be demonstrably wider than the existing model and longer, too. And, just to make sure people understand this is an all-new concept to lead the brand into the future, Smart will take the extreme step of showing the car without doors or a roof. With its sales struggling globally, the next generation of Smart models will include the production version of the fourjoy when it appears in 2015, boasting more size in every conceivable dimension. It will be nearly a three feet longer and half a 1.5 feet wider than the existing fortwo and will be based on a small-car architecture smart picked up from parent company Daimler&amp;#039;s partnership with Nissan-Renault. This architecture will also be put into production as a forfour, and will carry the brand&amp;#039;s usual styling cues like its upright grille face, its round headlights and its Tridion safety cell design.  As to the relevance of the concept to future models, Smart&amp;#039;s CEO, Dr. Annette Winkler, said, &amp;quot;The outer proportions of the fourjoy reveal much of what is available for the appearance of our four-seater series smart. &amp;quot; Smart is hoping the production version has better luck than its last attempt at a four-seater, the Forfour, which was stupendously expensive even though it shared most of its underbody parts with the Mitsubishi Colt and was built in the same shared NedCar plant in The Netherlands. It only lasted two years in production before the axe fell. Production versions of the Fourjoy will also be built with pure-electric, gasoline and diesel powerplants sitting in the back of the car and driving the rear axles, as per Smart tradition. The system fitted to the Fourjoy has a 73.8-horsepower electric motor and, while Smart isn&amp;#039;t talking performance or range for its four-door-less concept car, you could theoretically drain its 17.6 kW/hours worth of lithium-ion battery in 20 minutes of full-throttle driving. But when does that happen? Instead, you could look to the second-generation electric Smart. That car, with a 14 kW/hour lithium-ion battery pack supplied by Tesla, managed a claimed 84-mile range, and the fourjoy&amp;#039;s battery pack holds 25 percent more charge, so 100 miles may not be out of the question.  Smart also promises there will be a full production electric version this time for sure. While the Fourjoy is a precursor to the third full generation of Smart prodcuts, it also represents the third generation of electric Smarts. The company built a 100-car fleet of electric first-generation Smarts, most of which were fed into a research program in London, in 2007. Generation two saw the automaker build 2000 off of the current fortwo body style, which were mostly fed into the Car2Go car sharing programs. Some were also leased into 18 countries around the world, including the United States. Cutely, the electrification of the Fourjoy doesn&amp;#039;t stop at its rear wheels. In what Daimler calls &amp;quot;The Last Mile&amp;quot;, it also carries a pair of electric longboard skateboards to get from a remote parking station to the office. No, really. This is a concept car, after all. The boards bolt into where the roof would be, and Smart backs this up with a pair of helmets and a pair of high-definition video cameras so Fourjoy drivers can conveniently share their electric skateboard crashes on social media.  &amp;quot;The Smart Fourjoy is the perfect icon for our Smart design philosophy that may be transferred to a new era. For the first time, we are showing the sporty four-seat layout of the new Smart family,&amp;quot; said Gorden Wagener, Head of Design at Daimler AG. &amp;quot;The typical Smart silhouette, clean lines and shapes, and also the development of the Smart face make this study a modern design icon,&amp;quot; he said. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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