Smart has built a self driving, car sharing concept for 2025

Smart has built a self driving, car sharing concept for 2025
Smart has built a self-driving, car-sharing concept
No steering wheel, no pedals: this is Smart's little self-driving pupster
This is the Smart Vision EQ Fortwo, and it is the first car in Daimler's mighty empire to completely do without a steering wheel or any pedals. Welcome, to a rather scary, wipe-clean future.
The reason for a lack of anything to actually, y'know, direct the car manually, comes from its brief. Smart describes it thusly: “A new vision of urban mobility and individualised, highly flexible, totally efficient local public transport.” It's a self-driving electric city car that ride shares, then.
The Vision EQ is the smallest car to come under Merc's EQ umbrella, and is a response to the latest trend of car-sharing (particularly popular in big US cities like LA); latest studies show that users of car share schemes globally will quintuple between now and 2025 to 36.7 million.
So, the car. It's a smidge longer, wider and shorter than your regular Smart Fortwo coupe, and features an all-electric drivetrain with a 30kWh lithium-ion battery on board, able to charge inductively. Inside you get a 24in display instead of a dashboard and, slightly disturbingly, an “easy to clean” leather bench seat (it is a shared car, after all). Outside, the vehicle's colours can be adapted to what the user fancies at that point in time, while the doors pivot "wing-like" over the rear axle. Makes getting in and out of the thing a bit easier, and reduces the chances of colliding with cyclists and other humans.