Swatch Maker Hayek Died Before They Made it Big, But The Smart Cars he Envisioned are Finally Coming
It's taken more than 20 years and a couple of generations of batteries, but relatively large volumes of battery powered Smart cars are finally on the horizon, scheduled for delivery in a little over a year from now. Too bad Nicolas Hayek, the inventor of the Swatch watch and the concept behind the Smart car, didn't quite live to see it.
Hayek, 82, died late last month. He was best known for coming up with the Swatch watch, a reliable, inexpensive, battery-powered watch whose unique selling proposition was a seemingly infinite variety of brightly colored faces and plastic straps. I still have one somewhere, with babies' faces on it.
The irreverent Swatch is widely credited with saving the stodgy, to put it mildly, Swiss watch industry, which in the 1980s was pricing itself out of business. The Swatch was Hayek's main claim to fame, but he also conceived the Swatchmobile, which eventually became the Smart car. (The company calls it lowercase smart.)
The Swatchmobile had some of the same characteristics as the Swatch watch. It was to be cheap and feature interchangeable, plastic body panels that would allow customers to change its colors. In the years that I've been covering the auto industry, there have been an awful lot of concept cars around the world that used that idea. But as far as I know, none of them has ever been produced. That's understandable -- car companies can't vouch for the safety of customers who bolt on their own body panels.
The Swatchmobile was also designed from the beginning to accommodate different alternate fuel powertrains, like battery power or hybrid battery-combustion, without having to redesign the entire car. That's harder than it sounds, since assembling a car is an elaborate process. You can't just "plug in" a different engine. To the greatest extent possible, the Swatchmobile was designed to do just that.
To get the Swatchmobile built, Hayek hooked up with Mercedes-Benz (DDAIF.PK) in 1989, after first exploring a partnership with Volkswagen (VLKAY.PK). Once the auto industry professionals took over, it was almost another decade before the Smart car went into production, and another decade after that before it was finally introduced in the United States -- coincidentally just in time to take advantage of the latest gasoline crisis.
However, the Smart production model, which was later named the fortwo, had no hybrid or electric motor, and no readily changeable colored body panels. It did have an expensive stability control system to keep it from rolling over in extreme maneuvering. By that time, Hayek was long gone from the project.
Fast-forward to 2010. A test fleet of 250 electric drive Smart cars is supposed to start arriving in the United States in October. Higher-volume production for sale to consumers is scheduled to start for the 2012 model year, in late 2011.
A fleet of battery powered cars is closer to what Hayek envisioned back in the late 1980s, and more like what people think of when they see the tiny size and the still-striking styling of the Smart fortwo. It looks the way a battery-powered car should look. And, at last, it will become a reality.
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Photo: Daimler