Mercedes-Benz R&D goes electric

Daimler group’s research and development spend has already tilted “very heavily” in favour of electric mobility.

That’s the word from the man who will soon take over the helm of the world’s most famous car-maker, Ola Kallenius.

Kallenius officially takes over from Dieter Zetsche as the boss of Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz and Smart, on May 22 (2019).

After a career that’s spanned most arms of the German giant, including everything from AMG to commercial vans and most recently R&D, he will lead the company at a time of unprecedented change.

According to Kallenius, the upweighting of spend from conventional powertrain development to electrification has taken place. Kallenius told carsales it really “kicked into gear” in 2015 when the company announced the development of its EQ range of electrical vehicles.

The soon-to-be Daimler boss hosted a round-table with Australian media at the launch of the first of Mercedes-Benz’s EQ models, the EQC 400 SUV.

“That [the start of EQ development] is really when we said let’s flick the switch and start shifting the funding and the effort towards a much, much more comprehensive electric strategy,” Kallenius explained.

“In the meantime, as you also know, we switched the Smart brand completely to electric. We’re actually phasing out the combustion engine versions of the Smart this year. So, in 2020 onwards Smart is fully electric.

“Same things are going on in the commercial vehicle side where the [Mercedes-Benz] van people have pretty much all of their line-up work now electrified. I rode last week in the electric city bus, the e-Citaro; there are a couple of trucks on the road and on the way, so you can see that the very comprehensive strategy in the whole group.

Kallenius confirmed the first tranche of Mercedes-Benz’s EQ electric passenger vehicle rollout would include SUVs above and below the EQC and a range of “sedans”.

He confirmed the investment in the first generation of Mercedes-Benz passenger vehicles as more than €10 billion (A$18.54 billion).

“It feels like we’re already tilting [investment] very heavily into this [EV] direction,” he stated, cautioning that development dollars would continue to be spent on combustion engines.

“If we take the ambition for 2030 to have about 50 per cent EVs that means at least 50 per cent of the cars will still have a combustion engine,” Kallenius explained.

“Obviously the 48-volt combustion vehicles and also the plug-in hybrids [will make up this 50 per cent] so we are continuing investing, making them better both on the emission side and on the fuel economy side, because that’s also a contributor to reduction of CO2.

“You have to do both during the transition but needless to say [we are seeing] a very, very, very strong shift towards electrification as we speak,” Kallenius concluded.