By early 2000, the Smart City-Coupe had finally started to gain sales momentum, with its Cabrio version making a significant addition to total Smart sales. In March Mauer left Smart for Saab, succeeded by Hartmut Sinkwitz in May. As the third design director of Smart during the Roadster's development, Sinkwitz had to bring the concept to production in a very short time. This task may have been made somewhat easier by the Roadster having been designed from the start to use existing powertrain and other City-Coupe components. Given some of the advanced design features, it is a credit to the design team that so much of the concept car made it to production.