#Daimler

TTAC readers who followed our past reporting on the developing relationship between Daimler and the Renault/Nissan Alliance will not be surprised in hearing what Carlos Ghosn and Dieter Zetsche told the press today. If you think you’ve heard it all before, you are right. You did here.

So far, German car companies Volkswagen and Daimler had been unaffected by the severe downdraft in Europe and brought in record profits. Now, the Teflon seems to be flaking off.

The German edition of the Financial Times has a story about “broken taboos.” It says that “smaller Mercedes models and cars of Nissan’s premium division Infiniti could together roll off the assembly lines in 2016.” The FTD heard that the joint car could be “a small SUV, possibly based on the Mercedes A or B class.” Reuters has a good English abstract of the German story. Apparently, the FTD was asleep when a major busting of taboos was perpetrated in the beginning of the year.

The excitement about battery electric vehicles seems to die down amidst disappointing uptake. Range, weight and cost are in the way. At the same time, dormant interest in fuel cell vehicles is being rekindled . A month ago, we had a new look at the technology from the perspective of the Toyota/BMW linkup. Today, The Nikkei [sub] takes a broader view and says that carmakers are in the final lap of the fuel cell race. Let’s have a look at the contestants and where they stand.

Germany’s Auto-BILD thinks it knows how it will look when Daimler shrinks the G-Wagen. In 2015, Daimler will bring out a GLG based on the new A-Class, says the magazine. Auto-BILD hasn’t seen more than the own renderings, but that doesn’t keep the rag from bitching:

It looks more and more like a divided Europe. While carmakers Opel, Ford, PSA, Fiat etc. are wailing with pain, German carmakers report expectation-beating profits.

Whenever the good folks at Daimler hear about European overcapacity, they ask: “Why can’t we have some of it?” Daimler’s compact cars are so popular that the plants in Rastatt, Germany, and Kecskemét , Hungary, are already bursting at the seams, and will even more so once the new A-Class starts shipping in fall.. Therefore, Daimler outsourced A-Class production to Valmet, the Finnish contract manufacturer.

800 workers at a Daimler plant that builds Sprinter commercial vehicles downed their tools and walked off the job after wage talks collapsed.

So they finally took the wraps off the long anticipated and already much hated Urus, the SUV concept from Lamborghini.

The Emir of Abu Dhabi is tired of the car business. Germany’s Spiegel Magazin heard that Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Aabar wants to sell all stock in Daimler. Aabar also wants out of Daimler’s Formula 1 team and the joint investment in Tesla.

Record new car sales are not the news one does expect from Europe. But those are the news from Germany.

One by one, German automakers – with the notable exception of Opel – are reporting unheard-of numbers. Let’s have a look.

March was a great month for the auto industry, and an analyst’s Waterloo. The real-time data equipped heavy-weights of Edmunds, TrueCar and Kelley were solidly trounced by bankers with a better feel, better sources, or simply better luck. The podium of March’s “Grade The Analysts” is populated by brokers and bankers, the professional auto oracles have been degraded to also-runs.

If you sell anything, a house, a car, a company, you always appreciate a good bidding war. Rivals Audi and Daimler could be in such a bidding war, if Italy’s Corriere della Sera is correctly informed. They are feuding over a troubled maker of motor cycles, Ducati.

Daimler and BYD unveiled their joint EV brand Denza today. They literally just unveiled the brand. The cars will be unveiled at the Beijing Motor Show in the last week of April. They should have kept everything covered and hire some professionals.

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.