Delay for Mercedes-Benz GLK explained

The message of anger and dismay from right-hand drive markets was too late arriving at Mercedes-Benz HQ in Stuttgart for the company to resolve the lack of a competitor to BMW's X3 and the Audi Q5 in those same markets.

As we've reported in the past Benz didn't think to engineer the GLK - its rival to the X3 and Q5 for right-hand drive markets - despite the X3 selling close to 1200 units in Australia for 2011 so far, and the Q5 selling nearly 2000 over the same period.

According to the chief engineer for the new Benz M-Class, Thomas Merker, there were various reasons why the company couldn't extricate itself from a quandary of its own making. First of all, he said, it was not, and should not be seen as reflecting a lower regard for right-hand drive markets.

"We do not put right-hand drive below the line for functionality…" he said. In other words, the company's philosophy is that RHD markets should be treated the same as LHD markets; they should get vehicles engineered and built to the same standard, for instance.

Merker, despite his work with the M-Class in recent times, is well aware of the disappointment from Benz offices in RHD markets when it was first known that the GLK wouldn't be available, since he had worked on the smaller SUV before his current assignment.

All the "right-hand drive mafiosa", as Merker referred to them, made their way en masse to Stuttgart to make their case, to no avail. One of those mafiosa, David McCarthy, Benz's Senior Corporate Communications Manager in Australia, said that the Australian market was likely to have been the largest RHD market for the GLK in the short term at least. McCarthy also told motoring.com.au that the prestige importer would even have accepted RWD-only GLKs if that was what it took to have an ADR-homologated answer to the BMW and Audi.

Even that wasn't to be — and Merker explained why. The GLK is built in the company's Bremen factory and production there is already outpaced by demand from huge LHD markets around the world — especially China and the USA. It simply made no sense for Mercedes-Benz to drop everything (including the manufacturing output itself) to upgrade the production line in order to accommodate a small number of RHD vehicles slated for smaller, mature markets like Australia. That change would have come at a considerable cost to the company also.

Far better, Merker argued vicariously, for the company to wait for the next generation GLK, which would be engineered for RHD and would hit all markets around the world — hopefully — with the sort of big, profitable splash that helps amortise the cost of an upgraded production line much faster than a mid-life refresh would.

Also, by that time, around 2015, there'll be a Benz factory in China, producing the GLK for local consumption there. That will take much of the pressure off the Bremen factory.

According to Merker, the GLK's steering mechanism is fouled by the front drivetrain components in the four-wheel drive variants in RHD applications. The engineer explained that Benz had investigated a kludge in the form of linking the steering column on the right of the car to the steering mechanism on the left.

"It worked," Merker emphatically stated, but in-house staff were concerned by the added weight and complexity, so the decision was made not to proceed with that system for RHD markets.

From what Merker says, Benz has certainly come to recognise the importance of right-hand drive markets in the global scheme of things. Australia might be a small market, but India, with the second largest population in the world, is a right-hand drive market too; one of ever growing importance to Benz. Merker gave the example of the prospective Indian buyer who wanted a new S-Class delivered immediately — and the usual shipping time wasn't going to be fast enough. He demanded the company fly the car from Germany to India…