Paris 2010: Smart escooter and ebike roll in

Smart escooter concept – Click above for high-res image gallery

Envision a Smart fortwo after some extensive reworking. Start by lopping off the body, dropping two wheels, slicing it down to the bare essentials required for urban mobility and then electrify it. Once you do all this, you might end up with something resembling the Smart escooter that took to the stage at the Paris Motor Show today. Yeah, it's a bit of stretch, but Smart's escooter concept represents a high-tech approach to travel in congested urban settings. In essence, it takes the fortwo's basic and efficient transportation ability and gives it a new, two-wheeled meaning.

Sporting a 4 kW rear-wheel-mounted direct hub drive motor and a 48-volt lithium-ion battery pack, Smart's two-wheeled machine has the goods to get the job done. With a range of 62 miles and a top speed of 28 miles per hour, the escooter concept could tool around urban areas and even venture out to make the occasional longer trip with ease. The escooter concept is "zero-emissions" mobility, simplified.

But that's not all. Smart also unveiled an even simpler two-wheeled vehicle in Paris today, an electric bicycle concept called the ebike. The battery provides extra power when the rider pedals and the ebike can also use the smart drive kit app that is available in the iTunes app store. No price was mentioned for the ebike, but in the fortwo, just the installation costs $300, so let's hope Smart has decided to make the two-wheeled version a bit less costly.