Daimler – who brings you legendary vehicles including Mercedes-Benz – has invented a couple of things. Like the car.The men (and women) at Daimler didn’t rest at that. Over the decades the company has come up with an astounding list of innovations that continually remind me why of all automotive outfits this is the one I admire the most. Indeed I’ve been eulogising Mercedes products in print for almost two decades now, and one day I must tell you how the love affair began when I was a teen.Just some Daimler innovations include running the first crash tests. That was back in 1959 when occupant safety was still an afterthought at best for most other manufacturers. In fact, just last night I was reading a 1975 copy of UK Car magazine from my collection and was astounded to see that even then some cars were sold with safety belts as optional extras, That would have been unthinkable on a Mercedes.
In 1978 ABS premiered on Mercedes passenger cars (1981 for commercial vehicles). In 1981, the airbag and belt tensioner were available for standard production cars. In 1996 Brake Assist was introduced as standard. Yet another world first for passenger cars. The list goes on and on, and if you’re a petrolhead some of this might be familiar to you.But what you probably didn’t know – I certainly didn’t – was that as far back as 1906 hybrid vehicles were on sale, marketed as the Mercedes Mixte. Cut now to recent times. The threat of global warming and dwindling fossil-fuel supplies threatens. Of course, Daimler has seen this coming and already has a three-route roadmap for the future of the vehicle well underway.
One of these routes is hybrids (the other two involve optimising fossil-fuel engines and producing zero-emission vehicles, all of which are now in series production).“For more than a century, automobiles ran almost exclusively on fuels derived from mineral oil,” as Dr Martin Zimmermann, CEO and president of Mercedes-Benz SA, points out.“And for good reason: short refuelling times, high operating ranges, a comprehensive infrastructure, and favourable prices made the internal combustion engine the driving force of mobility.”Continues Dr Zimmermann: “It is now clear that a variety of different technologies will continue to exist side by side for some time to come. At Daimler AG we address this matter with a broad spectrum of alternative and clean-drive technologies, second to nobody in our industry.”At Daimler, of course, hybrids are well into series production. Take but the Mercedes-Benz S 400 HYBRID.
Introduced in 2009, this stately Merc made Daimler the first European manufacturer to offer a hybrid passenger car from large-series production. Then there’s the Mercedes-Benz Vision 500 Plug-in Hybrid. And it boasts a certified fuel consumption of 3.2 litres per 100km. That’s right – 3.2 litres. Meanwhile it has a purely electrical operating range of 30 kilometres. I could go on and mention the Mercedes E 300 BlueTEC HYBRID which is a near-series (meaning it’s almost in production) diesel hybrid machine.
Moving over to the commercial vehicle sector, Daimler has made massive strides which is all part of its “Shaping Future Transportation” initiative launched back in 2007.Take the Mercedes-Benz Atego BlueTEC hybrid, which uses especially low-emission technology ex-factory for the first time in Europe. In fact, the first fifty of these trucks were delivered to German commercial customers earlier this year, and the machine was voted “Truck of the Year 2011.”Plus last year it received the “German sustainability award” in the category of “Germany’s most sustainable products/services.” So it’s hardly surprising that Daimler is the global market leader in hybrid drive systems for commercial vehicles. And over in North America, for instance, around 3 200 Orion Hybrid buses, 1 500 Freightliner vehicles and 1 100 light trucks and busses from Mitsubishi FUSO (which falls under the Daimler umbrella) are in operation.As for America’s legendary yellow school buses, hybrid versions of these are now in production (from Thomas Built Buses).And in Japan, the FUSO Aero Star Eco Hybrid is already the second generation of hybrid buses to be launched on the market.Then there’s the 6.5 tonne Canter Eco Hybrid, with its 3 tonne payload. It’s the ideal urban delivery vehicle, especially now that the low sulphur fuels needed to power its Euro 4 engine are available in the major metro areas in Japan, Europe and Australia.I could go on and on. But this is not a technological treatise, while a surfeit of detail, fascinating as it is, can lead to MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over).Besides, the ultimate future of Daimler vehicles – and obviously that includes Mercedes – lies on the zero-emission path. Something that is already well in production, not just development, and which I can’t wait to tell you about in my next piece…
