Sharing platforms for the future

Mercedes-Benz has a solution for small-car safety and packaging in the 21st Century, but will the prestige maker on-sell its intellectual property to marketplace rivals?

With the new B-Class, Benz has introduced a slightly different type of floor construction underpinning it. The semi-sandwich construction embraces the principles of the original floorpan used in A and B-Class cars developed prior to the new B-Class, but the new floor lends itself to a much wider range of applications.

Benz's VP of program management for the A/B-Class, Jörg Prigl, explained to motoring.com.au how the new concept works and why it is a much more practical system for differing vehicle 'portfolios'.

"We changed the concept completely," Prigl began. "In the current A and B-Class we had only 'sandwich'. Therefore, we could not do a low-floor car, we could not do a classical hatchback car, some coupes, cabriolets, whatever...

"And then we thought: 'How can we combine the benefits of the sandwich with the need of the spread of the platform?'

"We call it now 'energy space'. In reality it's a semi-sandwich. We stay low at the front and behind the driver's seat we go up — and have the potential of storing battery and that stuff. So we keep the benefits of the old [platform] and avoid the [limitations]..."

The new platform can accommodate the needs of alternative-energy vehicles, with their batteries or fuel cell stacks or gas tanks located in different sections of the car, but it is sufficiently flexible to underpin conventional cars with low rooflines as well. That spreads the development cost across several different product lines, not just one or two. There were some concessions made for the new platform at least to meet the safety standards of the previous platform, Prigl explained.

"The front section got a little bit longer — with respect to crash [safety] — and of course we have been able to compensate for the consequences by some small ideas. We had to find some good ideas; basically it's a no-go for Mercedes to have a five-star rating with one car and the next car is not at least at that point.

"Don't worry, we found a smart solution. Don't forget, the sandwich was designed 20 years ago. In 20 years, we have been able to evaluate and make a continuing effort to make the best of the two worlds."

Prigl confirmed that the so-called energy space platform would lend itself to different wheelbases, unlike the sandwich platform underpinning earlier generations of A and B-Class, but he's under no pressure to use that platform flexibility for any of the variants to be built on the new platform.

"At the moment I do not need a longer wheelbase... the same wheelbase, but I can put the hydrogen tanks, the battery or whatever in there."

It's hard to ignore the potential for the platform to be extended and used in larger front-drive cars of the future — including possibly those of other manufacturers.

Prigl side-stepped the question from motoring.com.au concerning Benz's willingness — or otherwise — to share the energy space platform with other car companies. He basically stated that his remit was to keep the cars to be built on the B-Class platform within the same compact footprint, which is based on the same wheelbase of 2699mm. So the five different variants (believed to include a compact SUV and a CLS-style small sedan) might vary in overall length, but will all feature the same wheelbase measurement.

Ford recently told motoring.com.au that it saw the sandwich-construction floor as the ideal solution for small-car packaging with alternate energy drive systems, but the company's Vehicle Line Director for Global C-Cars, Gunnar Herrmann, also admitted that it was not a solution that suited high-volume manufacturing.

But the semi-sandwich floor resolves some of those issues Herrmann foresaw. When Benz is ready to move on to the next generation of B-Class, perhaps the company would consider selling the older generation floor to Ford or other mainstream manufacturers. After all, it's not like older Mercedes-Benz technology hasn't been sold to other companies in the past — even direct rivals.

Read the latest news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at carsales' mobile site...