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.
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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.