Reduce to the max.

Nicolas Hayek had already done the impossible once. The Lebanese-born consultant took the collapsing Swiss watch industry, gave it a cheap plastic watch you bought the way you bought a scarf, and made Swatch a global habit. From late 1982 he began asking why a car could not work the same way: standardized inside, endlessly personal outside, sold on design rather than displacement.

The press called it the Swatchmobile. Hayek described it to Autocar as a small electric car with room for "two people and two cases of beer," to be sold for a few thousand pounds. His own engineering company began the design work; the drivetrain was to be a hybrid.

He also knew he could not build it alone. Rather than take on the industry, he went looking for a partner inside it, and on 3 July 1991 shook hands with Volkswagen.

It did not survive the change of management in Wolfsburg. In 1993 the new leadership concluded that the Swatchmobile overlapped with VW's own three-liter small-car program and pulled out. Hayek's project was suddenly a set of drawings with no factory, no distribution and no money — and battery technology had not advanced anywhere near far enough to make his electric car cheap.

The smart City-Coupé reached customers in October 1998, across a first wave of European markets, in four panel colors over an anthracite Tridion cell. In cities where parking is a blood sport it was an instant hit: Rome and Paris took to it immediately, because a car 2.5 meters long can be parked nose-in to the curb, in gaps nothing else fits.

Everywhere else, it was a curiosity. Roughly 20,000 were sold in that first part-year against an original ambition of 200,000 a year, and suppliers who had geared up for volumes that never came had to be compensated. Sales did climb — past 100,000 a year by the early 2000s — but the two-seater alone was never going to carry a brand.

So smart did what young brands do: it multiplied. A cabrio. The crossblade of 2002 — 2,000 numbered cars with no roof, no doors and no windscreen, just silver bars, a wind deflector and a Brabus-breathed 70 hp. Then, in 2003, an actual sports car: the smart roadster and its fastback roadster-coupé, 700 cc, mid-engined, barely a meter and a quarter tall.

The roadster was adored and unprofitable. It also leaked: warranty work on water ingress is estimated to have cost around €3,000 per car, and production stopped after 43,091 had been built. In 2004 came the first forfour, a five-door built in the Netherlands on a Mitsubishi Colt platform — sensible, roomy, and almost entirely lacking whatever made a smart a smart.

In April 2005, DaimlerChrysler stopped the experiment. The roadster would end that year. The planned smart SUV, the formore, was abandoned outright. Around 700 jobs went, mostly at the brand's Böblingen headquarters, and the restructuring alone was booked at up to €1.2 billion against a promise to break even by 2007. The forfour followed in March 2006, and smart GmbH was dissolved into Mercedes-Benz Cars.

What survived was the thing that had worked all along. The second-generation fortwo arrived in late 2006 — 200 mm longer, structurally tougher, engineered from the start for American crash rules — and went on sale across Europe in 2007 with 50,000 orders already taken.

In early 2008 it reached the United States, arriving exactly as fuel prices spiked, and for a moment the strangest car in America had a waiting list.

The third generation, unveiled in Berlin on 16 July 2014, was built with Renault: the fortwo and a revived forfour shared their platform and much of their hardware with the Twingo, the forfour built alongside it in Slovenia. Same silhouette, same exposed Tridion cell, same 2.69 meters. Nearly two decades in, the shape had become permanent.