#Mercedes

This is a short story of how we sometimes arrive at the truth. Letting go of deep-seated childhood emotional responses is hard. Growing up in the fifties in Austria, Mercedes was my true God. My father had a friend with a 300 SL Gullwing, and I spent hours walking around it, absorbing each detail. There was an old Tatra streamliner in the neighborhood. Aerodynamics, efficiency, and speed are my triggers. In 1985, I bought one of the first W124 300E sedans in LA, in part because its Cd. of .28 was the best in the world then, as well as its 140 mph top speed. Just yesterday, in Part 3 of the History of Automotive Aerodynamics, I concluded the survey of current production car aerodynamics record-holders with the 2010 Mercedes E-Class coupe, honoring its widely disseminated Cd of .24, lower than even the 2010 Prius. Looking at the picture of that E Class coupe this morning triggered a totally unexpected upsurge of that old lust, something that I thought was long extinguished, and I actually went to the Mercedes web site for strictly personal reasons. I expected that Mercedes would be trumpeting the coupe’s .24 Cd proudly. Not so, and for a good reason.

VW and Audi combined for a hell of a month, with combined sales up 40 percent. The Beetle is back, kind of, but the Jettas still butter the bread at VWOA. At Audi, the A4/A5/Q5 combo combined for two thirds of the brand’s 6,510 January sales. Subaru‘s Impreza and Forester are a down a bit from their big 2009 numbers, but the new Legacy/Outback duo were up over 100 percent. Mercedes had a strong January across the board, with only the tired SLK, CLK, CL and CLS failing to grow sales. Also, 156 people bought an R-Class this month.

Mercedes sold only 2,825 R Class “Grand Sport Tourer” models in the US last year, confirming once and for all that the eigenwillig CUV is a bonafide flop in this country. So much so that a GL-inspired restyling is already under development, possibly with a GL-inspired name as well: GLR.

If you hear a loud screeching noise coming from the Stuttgart area, that’ll probably be Dieter Zetsche berating his Asian management team. The Economic Times of India reported that the Mercedes-Benz marque has lost its leadership of the luxury car segment in India to BMW after nearly ten years on top. Daimler also posted a 10.43% decline in sales in India, as volume fell to 3,247 units (if that doesn’t seem like much, consider that Mercedes also trails BMW in China by about 60k units to about 90k). And just like that, out come the excuses: “We are behind BMW in 2009 because of limited availability of our E-Class car … I don’t want to focus on leadership. We want to have a profitable growth,” Mercedes Benz India Managing Director and CEO Wilfried Aulbur told reporters. “We see a very strong growth in 2009 and it will be a blockbuster year for us. We are very bullish and we expect, it will be a high double-digit growth.”

Automotive News China [sub] reports that Mercedes believes its Chinese-built cars are every bit as good as its German-built models. Ulrich Walker, Chairman and CEO of Daimler Northeast Asia says:

Yes, our cars here are exportable. There is no difference in quality with those made outside China.

But, as Bertel Schmitt reports, demand for luxury cars is strong enough in China that we won’t be seeing “Beijing, China” as the point of assembly on US-market Mercs.

It’s a strange world. Europeans are changing their already small cars for tiny ones. Manufacturers fall over themselves building ever smaller and cheaper cars. In the USA, small cars are suddenly big. Ford’s analyst George Pipas says that this year, small cars accounted for 21 percent of all U.S. vehicle sales. By 2013, Pipas predicts that compact cars, subcompact cars and crossover vehicles built off small car platforms will account for 36 percent of total new vehicle sales in the United States. Car executives that still have a job bemoan the times where big cars meant big profits.

A new frugality is rampant on the globe. Makers of luxo-barges, such as BMW and Mercedes are in big doo-doo.

After writing about Spyker transferring production from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom, I thought I’d seen it all. Well, now I have. Production going OUT of Germany and into the United States. After much debating, Daimler have finally decided to switch some production from Germany to the United States. According to Reuters, roughly a fifth of Mercedes-Benz C-Class models will be built in Alabama by 2014, in hopes of protecting against currency fluctuations and maintaining profit margin. Naturally, the unions weren’t happy, in fact they downed tools in protest, claiming it was a “blatantly wrong decision.” Dr Z saw it differently, especially considering the move is said to be worth $100m in incentives from the state of Alabama.

According to the German tabloid Express, Düsseldorf antique car dealer Michael Fröhlich has found Hitler’s car, a blue Mercedes 770K. Fröhlich started searching after a request by a Russian oligarch. He tracked the car to Austria, to where it had been sold for 2000 Reichsmark after the war. From there, the car went to the car museum of the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas. It was sent back to Germany into the collection of a loaded owner of a brewery in Munich. It finally ended up with a collector in Bielefeld. The collector had 5 more of the Nazi cars, one of them formerly Joachim von Ribbentrop’s daily driver.