Mercedes-Benz: Synthetic fuels are a dead-end

Mercedes-Benz will not follow its rivals by investing in synthetic fuels, says the German luxury car-maker's R&D boss Markus Schafer.

Despite Audi, Bentley, Mazda, McLaren and even Volkswagen investing heavily in the development of synthetic fuels, Mercedes-Benz says it will hold fast and keep investing billions in developing battery-powered vehicles.

“We have made a clear decision that our way will be electric first,” he said. “When we develop new platforms, we think electric first. We have to watch regulations and customer behaviour, but this will be our main road,” he told

According to Schafer, the biggest barrier to synthetic fuels is the amount of energy required to create them.

“If you have an abundance of energy, the best use is to put it directly into a battery. To transform green energy into an e-fuel is a process where you lose a lot of efficiency.

“If there were more clean energies available, then the first customers would probably be in the aviation industry. Far, far later – I don’t see this in the next 10 years – will come the car industry.”

McLaren has become one of the most recent advocates of CO2-neutral synthetic fuels because of the difficulties in creating a pure-electric hypercar. Battery-powered vehicles, says the supercar-maker, are too heavy and take too long to charge for them to be a direct replacement for vehicles like the McLaren Senna.

Mazda, meanwhile, is banking on microalgae for a synthetic fuel breakthrough as they only emit the CO2 they absorb during their lifecycle.

The Japanese car-maker has already forecast that even in 2030, 95 per cent of all vehicles will still be powered by internal combustion engines, which will remain the dominant motive force until at least 2040.