Mercedes is now pushing for lower emission motoring. Kyle Fortunelooks at how they are progressing
THE CAR – you couldn’t ask for a more potent anti-environmental symbol. Car manufacturing, perhaps more than any other industry, has borne the brunt of the rising wave of environmentalism, the car being an easy, quantifiable target. As one of the founding fathers of this polluting revolution, German firm Mercedes recognises it’s in the firing line so has developed its “Road to Emissions Free Mobility” project.
Thomas Weber of the board of management at parent company Daimler, outlines Mercedes’s objective as emission-free driving with fuel cell and battery-powered vehicles. But it’s not going to be an immediate change, he says. “The age of electric mobility will not arrive at the push of a button.”
The problem for a car firm like Mercedes is in deciding which technology to back. After over a century where the internal combustion engine was the only show in town, picking the wrong technology to lead us into the next generation could prove terminal to even the most established brand.
That’s why the cautious Germans have opted for a multi-faceted approach to the future. Despite its posturing – and plenty of concept models – the company has been slow to introduce hybrids. Like its European rivals, Mercedes lags behind Japan’s Toyota and Honda in providing electrically-assisted cars in its showrooms. Toyota’s Prius is now in its third generation, while Mercedes is only now just getting around to offering a hybrid S-Class in its range – and only in left-hand-drive markets.
Japan, the US and Europe’s differing attitudes to diesel power is partially responsible for the brand’s tardiness to adopt hybridisation. Japan and the US simply don’t embrace diesel cars like European customers, which makes electrically-assisted petrol engines the preferred route to lowering emissions and maximising fuel economy.
Modern diesels might offer economy to match the best hybrids – if not quite equal to their low CO2 emissions – but the rush is now on in Europe to get hybrids to market.
Weber admits that “diesel and hybrid offer the best opportunities – if everything were to be employed, an S-Class with sub-4l/100km is possible”.
That’s some way off the current 7.9l/100km that their new petrol/electric S 400 hybrid consumes. That’s down to cost as much as anything. Both hybrid and diesel hardware are expensive; combined, they’d be enough to make even wealthy Mercedes customers baulk.
Optimisation of existing technology has seen big advances; the new E-Class is as much as 23 per cent more economical than its predecessor.
However impressive the figures achieved by the Mercedes BlueEfficiency optimisation programme, there’s no denying that it was arch rival BMW that beat the three-pointed star to the showroom with cleaner conventional cars.
BMW’s EfficientDynamics, a series of technical revisions including regenerative braking systems, electric rather than hydraulic steering pumps, intelligent power management and stop-start systems, has been available in most of the BMW range for a few years now, while it’s only in the last year or so that Mercedes dealers have been able to offer similar.
Mercedes has been developing hydrogen fuel cells for decades, the current B-Class soon to be offered in production fuel cell guise, though a hydrogen filling network remains the fuel cell car’s biggest obstacle.
BMW has a hydrogen-fuelled, production-ready 7 Series being tested too, though Mercedes is seemingly taking a more conventional route with plug-in electric cars and its hydrogen fuel cell powered machines.
An electric A-Class will be unveiled later this year and, bizarrely, an all-electric version of the new AMG SLS supercar is also in the firm’s product plans.
The race to get the all-electric car to real consumers is on too. Mercedes can arguably point to its current Smart EV (electric vehicle) programme as one where it provides a production electric vehicle. The reality is that it’s still a work in progress – companies, not customers, drive the handful of cars on the road. The A-Class is likely to follow that same route, with a few cars being leased to companies for evaluation. But it’s the Japanese who are pushing hardest, Nissan announcing plans to have its Leaf – an all-electric, five-door family hatchback – in dealerships next year.
Weber might describe the Mercedes aim for emissions-free mobility as a road, but it’s clear that it’s a wide one, with lanes full of rivals driving in the same direction and at differing speeds.