Mercedes Will Cut Its Platforms In Half
Carmakers all over the world strive to make more with less. All car companies that want to be around in a few years are on some kind of a standardization drive. GM wants to cut its 30 platforms down to 14. Volkswagen wants to get rid of platforms altogether .
Mercedes will halve its vehicle architectures to two by 2015, and will double its number of model variants to 30, Automotive News [sub] reports.
Those 30 model variants will derive from a Mercedes Front Wheel Architecture (MFA) for compact cars (A class and B class) and a Mercedes Rear Wheel Architecture (MRA) for everything above. At the moment, Mercedes has four architectures: rear-, front- , all-wheel drive, and sports cars. (The G-Wagen does not count.) Standardization will shorten development time and will make for more efficient manufacturing. The time needed to make a Benz will sink from 43 hours in 2008 to 30 hours by 2015.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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The same platform will be used for the C-Class *and* the S-Class? Interesting. This will be the ultimate sausage, er, Frankfurter.
That is a whole lot of Mercedes models
how is Volkswagen going to build cars without a platform?
I am a little lost on how you turn a C-class into an S-class when all you have is a bunch of Lego blocks.