The future's electric, says Benz Chief

Mercedes-Benz CEO and Chairman, Doctor Dieter Zetsche has painted a simpler and broader picture for automotive energy needs in the future. Speaking at the Frankfurt motor show last week, Doctor Zetsche intimated that all the talk of energy diversification for road transport was clouding the fundamental issue.

Electric motors, with their native torque are the means of driving road transport in future. They're already in use for earthmovers and diesel/electric locomotives, so there's no effective limit to the applications they can address.

"Electricity within the car, as a growing percentage, is the name of the game," said Doctor Zetsche.

"This starts with the start/stop unit, it goes to mild hybrid, to full hybrid and then you come to range extender -- where it basically flip-flops, and the main is electric and combustion is the add-on -- and ends up with full electric, be it fuel cell or battery...

"In all cases, you need the auxiliary devices to be electrical. So you do it once -- and you do it now."

In other words, the motive drive systems are electric and the various means of powering them are just fiddling around at the edges. But the technology is available today for electric cars to be viable. When Doctor Zetsche talks about electric vehicles though, he means any type of vehicle that doesn't rely exclusively on a mechanical link between the road wheels and an internal combustion engine.

"Starting with hybrids, you use electric motors to drive the vehicle. Then it comes down to energy storage, so we have set up a clear modular system, which allows us to play these different cards -- not all of them on a stand-alone basis, but with a very much combined approach. I think the 'Blue Cell' vehicles we have shown today prove exactly that. As far as vehicle architecture is concerned, as far as the components are concerned, we have building blocks, which you put together in different ways in order to get to these different solutions."

The problem lies in the power source for the electric motors. If a company makes a wrong call, it could take years to recover. For example, a company developing a battery/electric vehicle for the Australian market may be trusting that battery technology will make the much anticipated break-through in coming years. If not, that company's product will be largely limited to urban use only -- and that would be a severe restriction in a country with such a large regional network of roads as Australia.

"It is extremely risky," says Zetsche, "if you are not just a commodity provider and technological follower, but one who runs at the forefront of technology -- to forget about one of these directions and bet that development will go in the other direction. They have different advantages for different applications. Therefore, the most likely solution is that we will see these technologies live in parallel for many years to come."

Daimler AG certainly sees itself at the forefront of technology, of course. The company has its fingers in many different pies and the three different BlueZero concepts at the Frankfurt show -- plus the S 500 Hybrid (pictured) -- are a reflection of that.

While battery/electric vehicles look to be the cars most readily accessible, there are infrastructure issues that apply to most developed countries. Infrastructure challenges for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are even worse, but Doctor Zetsche appears to favour the latter type of energy and is optimistic that a new initiative in Germany could be a paradigm for other countries.

"As far as their technical feasibility and readiness to market is concerned, we are at that tipping point with electric cars now. Clearly, the battery-electric car is constrained by limited range and long recharging time, whereas with the fuel cell vehicle, these disadvantages don't exist.

"In both cases, we need a new infrastructure, but with a battery/electric car you can start... To run with your home-made infrastructure...

"[I'm] very glad that we made a major step forward in Germany most recently, when many major car manufacturers of the world committed to the fuel cell -- and on that basis, seven or eight energy providers and 'Big Oil' committed to the take-up of a hydrogen network in Germany."

It's a case of baby steps for both battery/electric and fuel cell/electric vehicles. Society is possibly decades away from seeing either technology approach conventional internal-combustion cars for end cost to the consumer.

"All of these technologies come with major incremental cost," says Doctor Zetsche. "The chance to drive that down seems to me somewhat better on the fuel cell side than on the battery/electric side. Still, we have to work hard to get the cost into the range of conventional vehicles.

"[It's] clearly longer for the battery to get there -- if ever. Therefore, this will be a gradual change from one technology to the other and the 'in-betweens' -- like hybrids and plug-in hybrids -- are for quite some time the main part of the electrification of the country."

An important issue to overcome for battery/electric vehicles is not just the inability of the domestic electric grid to cope with recharging millions of cars a day, it's also the global production capacity for batteries. On that point, Doctor Zetsche retains an optimistic view -- for Mercedes-Benz buyers, at least.

"First of all, that's not a question which would affect us. In this case, our fate is in our own hands. Technology-wise we are the OEM with the most patents on batteries, because we never stopped continuing to develop this technology. We have a stake in a cell company, we have a majority in a battery company -- so we have the technology, the capacity, everything it takes to have as many batteries as we want.

"We are the only car manufacturer with a lithium-ion battery in series production and, therefore again, this might be a realistic risk for some other manufacturers, but certainly not us."

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