That brand is "Smart."
And it’s not even like Benz where Chinese money is just chilling in the 20% range~ Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, sold half its stake to China, so a Chinese company completely ate up 50% of the brand. Plus, Daimler itself is 20% Chinese capital now, so there's practically no basis left to call Smart a German car.
I'm not trying to rag on it by calling it a 'Chinese car' or whatever, but seriously, they don't have a single self-developed model anymore;; After the Chinese takeover, they halted production on all their own models, fired all the domestic workers, and pulled out of all factories in Germany LOL. Now they’ve become a complete joke of a company that just imports models made by 'Zeekr' (a brand under Geely) and simply rebadges them. They basically dismembered the company, crippled it so it couldn't develop cars itself, and then just brought in Chinese EVs and stuck a Smart badge on them to sell. It wasn't just 'taken over moderately' like Benz; they literally sucked all the tech dry and transformed it into a Chinese car;;
The Smart that used to make cute little German micro-cars is dead now, and the company has absolutely nothing to do with what it was back then. When I was little, I always thought they were so pretty whenever I saw one or two passing by...
They even quietly and completely moved the HQ itself to Ningbo, China, and the management was swapped out for Chinese executives. Now they literally have zero connection left to Germany, where the company was founded...
But sometimes I still see people on YouTube who think the new Smart is the same company.
"RIP the original Smart. Turns out it started as a 50/50 venture with a watch company (Swatch), but now it’s just another MG situation—a former European brand sucking on Geely’s exhaust. At least we got some laughs out of that original 'mouse bean' battery EV that couldn't handle German highway speeds."
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