8 ms·

Mercedes spends $8bn/year on R&D

58 points by t23 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bufferoverflow 2y ago
[flagged]
- parpfish 2y ago
  Congratulations?
- andrewjf 2y ago
  Tesla build quality is atrocious, the interior feels cheap, and their repair process is very long cycle time. I’ve known several people in the “never (Tesla) again” camp and now they’re buying Mercedes EVs, rivians (surprisingly) and Lucids. I have had a few Mercedes and they know how to maintain service on cars for a long long time. I’d never buy a Tesla. They are a joke and you’re paying for the name and they used to be able to charge a premium because they were the first to market
  - instalabs 2y ago
    The people who are impressed with a Tesla are the same people who are impressed with the build quality of a Chevy or a Buick. Ergo: they haven’t been exposed much to Mercedes-level build quality.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Why “surprisingly” about rivians? Build quality and serviceability of a Toyota is hard to beat though.
    - rconti 2y ago
      I'm guessing the idea of going from a passenger car to a truck but that's not exactly uncommon, especially because Rivan makes an SUV and plenty of people use SUVs and even 4 door pickups as everyday transportation.
  - rconti 2y ago
    > I’d never buy a Tesla. They are a joke and you’re paying for the name and they used to be able to charge a premium because they were the first to market I'm not sure where you're getting "charge a premium for the name" from. If anything, they're driving prices down. Batteries are expensive; they've cut corners on interiors and stuff like that in order to make them price competitive with ICE vehicles. Thankfully there are a lot more EVs on the market now but most manufacturers are having a hard time hitting the price/range points of Tesla. Every time I watch an EV review, the Tesla ends up being the benchmark, at least from a cost/range perspective. I recently watched the entire Out of Spec Motoring I-90 Surge EV "race" across the US, and, impressively, the 2 cheapest cars -- the Hyundai Ioniq6 and Model 3 RWD LR -- were right near the top in terms of roadtrip performance. Legacy automakers are just finally reaching parity.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
formerly_proven 2y ago
… and VW drops 23 billion on RND each year, but I’m not seeing 6x the output compared to Tesla.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  If you knew VW, it has way more people on payroll doing nothing for huge salaries than Imma-fire-80%-of-people Elon. Love him or hate him, he gets shit done.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    He does get shit done. Sometimes it's good shit, other times it's just shit. That cost-cutting approach worked with turning Tesla from the butt of (quite reasonable at the time) jokes about "Death Watch" because they kept needing more and more investment money, into the success they are today. It utterly failed with Twitter, which has lost most of its revenue and is constantly running into legal issues.
    - Cumpiler69 2y ago
      I don't see the failure in Twitter. It's a platform capable of influencing elections, that's definitely worth more than people think. It lost revenue since advertisers don't like the platform's freedom of speech, and Elon won't give them control of what's allowed on the platform. Advertisers want control, they don't want free speech. Why do you think You tube removed the downvote counter? Advertisers pay not just to how their stuff but to also be able to control the narrative. If crowds of people are allowed to freely light a brand on fire on Twitter, why would they pay to advertise there? Meta paid like 22 Billion for WhatsApp which is hardly bringing in revenue.
      - adamredwoods 2y ago
        Yes advertisers want control, wouldn't you? But it has nothing to do with "free speech". Try "good speech". Elon reduced the amount of subjective "good speech" and increased "bad speech". Advertisers have the freedom to do what they want. Elon, on the other hand, has absolute control of the words on his platform.
petesergeant 2y ago
> spends the equivalent of $7.4 to $8.4 billion every year on research and development Wonder what portion of this is opex masquerading as R&D, hiding behind “equivalent of”
- cf100clunk 2y ago
  With those kinds of burn rates there would likely be quite a lot of such overlap.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Equivalent of here just means they converted the number to dollars.
cf100clunk 2y ago
Csaba Csere (''Shobba Shedda'' will do in a pinch) has been writing for Car And Driver for ~44 years!
mindo 2y ago
Yet they are rumored to be sourcing 2026 CLA engine from Chinese Geely. Nothing agains Chinese companies, but aren't MB suppose to be luxury brand? Geely will probably offer vehicle with same engine, more tech for half the price.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  That R&D budget hasn't resulted in Mercedes making good engines. For example the M271 was notorious for going through timing chains, a supposedly lifetime part, in about 100 000 km. I've also owned two Mercedes and both have had the rear brake lines rust away. Thankfully in the latter they were replaced before they rusted through.
- rconti 2y ago
  Mercedes is pushing some pretty awful motors, like the new C63 4cyl turbo hybrid thing. Of course, a lot of this is driven by regulation, not Mercedes being cheap.
- porphyra 2y ago
  Out of all the Chinese car companies, the one that owns Volvo and Lotus is probably not a bad choice. They also plan to produce the Smart electric vehicles as a part of a joint venture with Geely. The CLA is also supposed to get self driving tech from Chinese startup Momenta.
- deergomoo 2y ago
  I would imagine fewer and fewer manufacturers are wanting to invest in combustion engine development at this stage, but regulations are getting ever tighter in much of the world. Plus an increasing number of people just want a vehicle as an appliance; if it looks cool and it's nice inside, they don't care what's making it go as long as it's reasonably reliable and doesn't drink fuel.
syntaxing 2y ago
I haven’t worked in a revenue positive company for over 5 years. But prior to that, once a year, someone would sit at my desk asking for anything I did was “new” and how so. In the states, any “research” work is a tax write off. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mercedes is using this as well.
- hackernewds 2y ago
  I have worked at a very ubiquitous large tech company and the file all data science team salaries as a tax write-off. because we are part of the r&d team, you might see yourself as being in the rnd team in your company HR management tool specifically for this reason
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Yes virtually all companies do this but some are very good (or aggressive) at this game. Classifying things as new research is easy to claim and hard to disprove. Think about it from the perspective of an auditor - they can’t do much more than check something off. Like there’s some vague project plan shared as evidence? Alright this checks out. Next company. The real problem is it’s big sophisticated incumbents who abuse this system. Young scrappy startups that are actually doing R&D often underutilize these tax breaks.
  - petercooper 2y ago
    Ah, the British tax authorities have a solution for this! They declare that R&D is "an advance in overall knowledge or capability in a field of science or technology" and that an independent expert has to agree with that. This means, of course, quite little is legitimate R&D and proving it is often more effort than it's worth. (It's unconnected that the UK contributes relatively little to major tech advancements nowadays compared to the size of its economy.. ;-))
- wongarsu 2y ago
  It's not just taxes, it's also important for your balance sheet. Which I imagine is important to a publicly listed company like Mercedes. If you pay someone $100.000 and they don't create anything, that's money you lost. But if you spend $100.000 on research or development (two subtly different things) there is the expectation that they created at least $100.000 of value that will be realized in future years. You didn't lose money, you converted it from cash to intangible assets, simply a different line on your balance sheet. The tax benefits more or less derive from that, along with the general consensus that we should encourage companies to invest into the future.
iforgotpassword 2y ago
OK WTF ist most of this? How about not targeting the upper market during inflation? > If I had had this tool when ordering my Porsche 911 a few years ago, I probably would have made a different color choice. Why not focus on what normal people want, like affordable reliable cars, instead of luxury cars with a dozen computers and screens in it where you need to get something fixed twice a year. Look at fucking Volkswagen being a whiney bitch about sluggish sales when they focused on the upper market too for the past couple years. They just fired a huge amount of staff. Obviously just from the lower ranks, you know, the folks who actually get shit done, to ensure the coke-sniffing managers can still pay themselves huge bonuses for being dumb idiots making the wrong calls. In 2019 Robert Habeck (green party) famously said in an interview[1], addressing head of Volkswagen Herbert Diess: "if you can't offer an EV for under 20,000€ by 2025, I fear you'll fail" - seems he was way off - by about a year. > Volkswagen AG revenue for the twelve months ending June 30, 2024 was $351.396B, a 10.2% increase year-over-year. But of course VW has enough buddies in politics that we'll probably just get a huge bailout package for poor Volkswagen, and all the managers can congratulate each other and keep going. [1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/robert-habeck-kritisiert-elektro-strategie-von-volkswagen-a-1266084.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/robert-habeck-...
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  >OK WTF ist most of this? How about not targeting the upper market during inflation? Why? The upper class is the one least affected by inflation. Just look how the stock market is doing. Even in bad times, luxury brands are selling just fine, this has been proven time and time again. Have you seen sales of Bugattis, Ferraris or McLarens slowing down? The problem is, VW is not a luxury brand, it's an expensive commodity, making it the first thing avenge people axe in tough times.
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    Then how did we end up with Volkswagen's situation? Selling 100 cars for 20k each sounds better than selling 2 for 200k.
rdtsc 2y ago
Hopefully it's about how to make their cars more reliable. /s Somehow Mercedes owners I know always have their car in the shop complaining how expensive it is to own a Mercedes and how often the fancy little features they have always break down.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  Obviously there are exceptions, but it's a common theme that expensive cars are expensive to own. You get to beta-test all the fancy new features before they trickle down to cheaper cars, and ease of construction or maintenance take a backseat to other concerns. Of course you can always get the worst of both worlds by buying a used formerly-expensive car. You get all the difficult and expensive maintenance for features that either didn't pan out or that everyone already has the more robust version of.
- tim333 2y ago
  My one is packed with not strictly necessary gadgetry and while well made, replacement bits are not terribly cheap. Like the first thing was the rear left ride height sensor broke and I've never previously even had a ride height sensor on a car.
wslh 2y ago
The cynic in me is already asking: where are the flying cars? They were at the top in F1 until 2021.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  Unless energy becomes significantly cheaper we are unlikely to see personal flying cars, and that’s also before you put all the car crashes that happen today and put them above people’s heads.
  - wslh 2y ago
    Please take it as a metaphor of how you can spend USD 8b/year.
    - 6510 2y ago
      https://www.pal-v.com/en/ https://www.pal-v.com/en/
  - masklinn 2y ago
    > we are unlikely to see personal flying cars There's already a few being developed, but that's not going to be for the peons e.g. pal-v started taking orders for Liberty this year, and apparently the price tag is somewhere between half and a mil.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Cars already kill two million people per year, plus another two maimed, plus pollution. Are you sure you want flying cars? :)
- 6SixTy 2y ago
  Thing about flying cars is that you can either have a good car or a good aircraft. Having both combined is worse at both and more expensive at both. Not to mention the headache of dealing with the FAA and whoever does vehicles to get it air and road worthy. In any case, we have helicopters which embodies the spirit of a flying car
up2isomorphism 2y ago
The fundamental problem is building a good car and letting customers changing a new Mercedes every couple of years are very different goals.
nashashmi 2y ago
Apart from the sinister assumptions one could make about the spending, I assume that Mercedes is obviously waisting a whole lot of money on this. Why? Because trying to merge electrical technology with mechanical technology in a highly safety-demanding environment means rigorous testing before 5 year old tech makes its way into the market only to be superseded by newer technologies that can be installed separately. The culture of invent and fail fast just doesn’t work here.
- tim333 2y ago
  They've been doing this for 139 years so have probably figured that. Come a long way from the Benz Patent-Motorwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen
panick21_ 2y ago
This is kind of crazy, Tesla at peak spent 4 billion $. And they used spend less then 2 billion $. And remember, Tesla is far more vertically integrated. Tesla has large spend in research for their battery and battery materials manufacturing. The make all their own chips, including even some on the data center. They also build robots. And do much of their own AI work. I must be that Tesla prefers to have some research simply be considered as part of product development. While Mercedes does the opposite.
- Cumpiler69 2y ago
  Well, Tesla is way more streamlined than the large, old, over-bloated ship that is Mercedes. Love or hate Musk, he knows how to run a very tight ship. While a lot of Mercedes's budget goes to armies of overpaid managers who do nothing except waste time in endless meetings where they either argue and backstab each other, or high-five and backstab each other, in order to advance their careers. Not an environment that breeds innovation and creativity at a high pace. Whatever is left goes to engineers that do actual work.
- alphabettsy 2y ago
  Mercedes might be bloated, but they also make over a dozen different vehicles including some commercial vehicles. They also, in my opinion, make vehicles at a level of quality and experience that Tesla can’t match especially at the mid to high-end.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Quality has to do with production and checking. Mercedes uses much the same methods and tools as everybody else. And in terms of interior quality, are you gone tell me they spend billion on research on how to make the interior nice? That literally makes no sense. More different vehicles doesn't really make sense either. If you go watch some teardowns on YT, you will see that most vehicles are on the same platform, and use very similar methods. More vehicles increases your cost, but not that much in R&D. What does cost if they are pushing, ICE, PHEV, EV and HEV at the same time.
encoderer 2y ago
Mercedes’ cheapest cars are about the same as a Camry but when you spend more you really do see this r&d spending in the product. I’ve owned 4 - expensive to maintain but wonderful to drive. I would say, you really only notice it when you leave your Mercedes behind and rent a Kia/Jeep/etc. I would like a touchscreen though - in addition to the buttons.
- okdood64 2y ago
  Same with the BMWs I've owned (2009 to 2019 MYs). Is cost of ownership (maintenance & tires) cheap? Not really. Do they have a lot of mechanical issues? Not really. Does it feel like a rock solid, purpose built machine that is enjoyable to drive with a great infotainment system? YES. I will say the little electrical gremlins can be annoying and pricey to fix, but I'm okay with it. I've owned Mazdas too which were 80% as great and don't have those problems, but with a little bit less "solidity".
chucke1992 2y ago
I wonder how much of it goes into "pension funds". As long as Mercedes (and any other old car companies) as not cutting their staff and pipelines, they will never be competitive with Tesla or Chinese companies. They have a lot of inertia but their development processes are too outdated at this point.
creativeSlumber 2y ago
> The most mechanical innovation we saw was a new type of brake for EVs. Although Mercedes says that EVs typically use regenerative braking for 98 percent of their decelerations, they still need friction brakes for that last 2 percent—which tend to be critical needs. The reason is simple: typical EV regen can provide a maximum of 290 kW of braking power, while a maximum 1G plus stop might require 2200 kW. >But because these friction brakes are not used much, their rotors tend to rust, leading to noise during application, as well as degraded appearance. And they still produce brake dust. >To solve these problems, Mercedes is developing what it calls In-Drive Brakes. The idea is to move the brakes from the wheels to inside the electric drive motor at either end, where the half-shafts emerge. The prototype is shown on the rear axle, but the concept could work at both ends. >The brake would not be a conventional disc brake but rather something that looks like the clutch in a manual transmission. There would be a disc that spun with the half-shaft connected to each wheel. This disc would have friction material on most of each side near the periphery and with something that looked like a non-rotating flywheel on each side. An annular hydraulic cylinder would press the assembly together causing the rotating friction disc to drag on the two fixed plates to slow the car. > Since this assembly would be fully enclosed in a housing at each end of the motor housing, the two fixed plates would have liquid cooling passages to remove the heat generated by the braking. A small sump at the base of each brake housing would serve to collect the brake dust generated. mercedes benz innovations future technologies 2024, in drive brake Mercedes-Benz > The goal would be for these brakes to last for the life of the car. Being enclosed, they would be quiet. And being inboard, they would leave the wheels clean, reduce unsprung weight, and allow greater freedom for wheel designers, who would no longer have to worry about getting cooling air into the brakes. This is NOT an innovation. The initial mentioned problem of brake discs possibly rusting because they are rarely used can be easily address by the car computer periodically using the disc brakes rather than regenerative brakes if those haven't been used recently. Applying the disc brakes a few times every couple of days should not impact the range measurably. They are making an easily reparable wear item such as brakes, almost cost prohibitive (labor costs) to replace by putting it inside depths of the electric drive unit. You now have to disable and disconnect high voltage battery , pullout the electric motor (usually include the motor, differential gear units, inverters in the same unit so it is similar to pulling out an engine in a ICE car), then take apart that engine, replace the friction clutches used for breaking, and then reverse the whole process to put it all back together. The only thing this is designed to do is to sell more cars every x years by making cars harder to repair. The funny sad thing is; this is clear anti-consumer activity ironically developed with consumers (tax payers) money using tax write-off for R&D. This type of thing is also why electric cars have a bad reputation at the moment. They depreciate so fast because the the greedy companies design them to make it impossible to repair economically, and insurance companies write them off after the tiniest accident/issue.
Szpadel 2y ago
> The 800-volt battery used in the upcoming new CLA has its 912 cells wired in series. That means that if one cell is subpar, the entire string loses efficiency. If each cell were attached to one of these new converters, its four-volt output could be increased to 800 volts and they could all be wired in parallel. And a deficient cell would have a much smaller effect. This is wrong in so many levels. It's probably 4x 228 in series so each cell would have about 3.5V nominal voltage to get 800V We put more and more in series for a reason, EV have peak power like 200kW, it's 250A already for 4V that is claimed here it would be 50000A, cables to handle this would be heaviest thing in the car. I don't think this converter is able to boost voltage, that would be waste of components, it's for sure meant for stepping down 800V to 12/24/48V used for the rest of the car in low voltage system. I get it that journalist cannot be specialists in every topic but I feel that they should consult it with someone before publishing
kkfx 2y ago
Honestly? So far the most problematic EVs I've seen are from Mercedes, Tesla and South Koreans EVs suffer much less, Chinese EVs much, much, much less... I do not know who much investments have all automakers but...

58 points by t23 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bufferoverflow 2y ago

[flagged]

parpfish 2y ago
Congratulations?
andrewjf 2y ago
Tesla build quality is atrocious, the interior feels cheap, and their repair process is very long cycle time. I’ve known several people in the “never (Tesla) again” camp and now they’re buying Mercedes EVs, rivians (surprisingly) and Lucids. I have had a few Mercedes and they know how to maintain service on cars for a long long time. I’d never buy a Tesla. They are a joke and you’re paying for the name and they used to be able to charge a premium because they were the first to market
- instalabs 2y ago
  The people who are impressed with a Tesla are the same people who are impressed with the build quality of a Chevy or a Buick. Ergo: they haven’t been exposed much to Mercedes-level build quality.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Why “surprisingly” about rivians? Build quality and serviceability of a Toyota is hard to beat though.
  - rconti 2y ago
    I'm guessing the idea of going from a passenger car to a truck but that's not exactly uncommon, especially because Rivan makes an SUV and plenty of people use SUVs and even 4 door pickups as everyday transportation.
- rconti 2y ago
  > I’d never buy a Tesla. They are a joke and you’re paying for the name and they used to be able to charge a premium because they were the first to market I'm not sure where you're getting "charge a premium for the name" from. If anything, they're driving prices down. Batteries are expensive; they've cut corners on interiors and stuff like that in order to make them price competitive with ICE vehicles. Thankfully there are a lot more EVs on the market now but most manufacturers are having a hard time hitting the price/range points of Tesla. Every time I watch an EV review, the Tesla ends up being the benchmark, at least from a cost/range perspective. I recently watched the entire Out of Spec Motoring I-90 Surge EV "race" across the US, and, impressively, the 2 cheapest cars -- the Hyundai Ioniq6 and Model 3 RWD LR -- were right near the top in terms of roadtrip performance. Legacy automakers are just finally reaching parity.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

formerly_proven 2y ago

… and VW drops 23 billion on RND each year, but I’m not seeing 6x the output compared to Tesla.

Cumpiler69 2y ago
If you knew VW, it has way more people on payroll doing nothing for huge salaries than Imma-fire-80%-of-people Elon. Love him or hate him, he gets shit done.
- ben_w 2y ago
  He does get shit done. Sometimes it's good shit, other times it's just shit. That cost-cutting approach worked with turning Tesla from the butt of (quite reasonable at the time) jokes about "Death Watch" because they kept needing more and more investment money, into the success they are today. It utterly failed with Twitter, which has lost most of its revenue and is constantly running into legal issues.
  - Cumpiler69 2y ago
    I don't see the failure in Twitter. It's a platform capable of influencing elections, that's definitely worth more than people think. It lost revenue since advertisers don't like the platform's freedom of speech, and Elon won't give them control of what's allowed on the platform. Advertisers want control, they don't want free speech. Why do you think You tube removed the downvote counter? Advertisers pay not just to how their stuff but to also be able to control the narrative. If crowds of people are allowed to freely light a brand on fire on Twitter, why would they pay to advertise there? Meta paid like 22 Billion for WhatsApp which is hardly bringing in revenue.
    - adamredwoods 2y ago
      Yes advertisers want control, wouldn't you? But it has nothing to do with "free speech". Try "good speech". Elon reduced the amount of subjective "good speech" and increased "bad speech". Advertisers have the freedom to do what they want. Elon, on the other hand, has absolute control of the words on his platform.

petesergeant 2y ago

> spends the equivalent of $7.4 to $8.4 billion every year on research and development Wonder what portion of this is opex masquerading as R&D, hiding behind “equivalent of”

cf100clunk 2y ago
With those kinds of burn rates there would likely be quite a lot of such overlap.
adastra22 2y ago
Equivalent of here just means they converted the number to dollars.

cf100clunk 2y ago

Csaba Csere (''Shobba Shedda'' will do in a pinch) has been writing for Car And Driver for ~44 years!

mindo 2y ago

Yet they are rumored to be sourcing 2026 CLA engine from Chinese Geely. Nothing agains Chinese companies, but aren't MB suppose to be luxury brand? Geely will probably offer vehicle with same engine, more tech for half the price.

Hamuko 2y ago
That R&D budget hasn't resulted in Mercedes making good engines. For example the M271 was notorious for going through timing chains, a supposedly lifetime part, in about 100 000 km. I've also owned two Mercedes and both have had the rear brake lines rust away. Thankfully in the latter they were replaced before they rusted through.
rconti 2y ago
Mercedes is pushing some pretty awful motors, like the new C63 4cyl turbo hybrid thing. Of course, a lot of this is driven by regulation, not Mercedes being cheap.
porphyra 2y ago
Out of all the Chinese car companies, the one that owns Volvo and Lotus is probably not a bad choice. They also plan to produce the Smart electric vehicles as a part of a joint venture with Geely. The CLA is also supposed to get self driving tech from Chinese startup Momenta.
deergomoo 2y ago
I would imagine fewer and fewer manufacturers are wanting to invest in combustion engine development at this stage, but regulations are getting ever tighter in much of the world. Plus an increasing number of people just want a vehicle as an appliance; if it looks cool and it's nice inside, they don't care what's making it go as long as it's reasonably reliable and doesn't drink fuel.

syntaxing 2y ago

I haven’t worked in a revenue positive company for over 5 years. But prior to that, once a year, someone would sit at my desk asking for anything I did was “new” and how so. In the states, any “research” work is a tax write off. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mercedes is using this as well.

hackernewds 2y ago
I have worked at a very ubiquitous large tech company and the file all data science team salaries as a tax write-off. because we are part of the r&d team, you might see yourself as being in the rnd team in your company HR management tool specifically for this reason
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Yes virtually all companies do this but some are very good (or aggressive) at this game. Classifying things as new research is easy to claim and hard to disprove. Think about it from the perspective of an auditor - they can’t do much more than check something off. Like there’s some vague project plan shared as evidence? Alright this checks out. Next company. The real problem is it’s big sophisticated incumbents who abuse this system. Young scrappy startups that are actually doing R&D often underutilize these tax breaks.
- petercooper 2y ago
  Ah, the British tax authorities have a solution for this! They declare that R&D is "an advance in overall knowledge or capability in a field of science or technology" and that an independent expert has to agree with that. This means, of course, quite little is legitimate R&D and proving it is often more effort than it's worth. (It's unconnected that the UK contributes relatively little to major tech advancements nowadays compared to the size of its economy.. ;-))
wongarsu 2y ago
It's not just taxes, it's also important for your balance sheet. Which I imagine is important to a publicly listed company like Mercedes. If you pay someone $100.000 and they don't create anything, that's money you lost. But if you spend $100.000 on research or development (two subtly different things) there is the expectation that they created at least $100.000 of value that will be realized in future years. You didn't lose money, you converted it from cash to intangible assets, simply a different line on your balance sheet. The tax benefits more or less derive from that, along with the general consensus that we should encourage companies to invest into the future.

iforgotpassword 2y ago

OK WTF ist most of this? How about not targeting the upper market during inflation? > If I had had this tool when ordering my Porsche 911 a few years ago, I probably would have made a different color choice. Why not focus on what normal people want, like affordable reliable cars, instead of luxury cars with a dozen computers and screens in it where you need to get something fixed twice a year. Look at fucking Volkswagen being a whiney bitch about sluggish sales when they focused on the upper market too for the past couple years. They just fired a huge amount of staff. Obviously just from the lower ranks, you know, the folks who actually get shit done, to ensure the coke-sniffing managers can still pay themselves huge bonuses for being dumb idiots making the wrong calls. In 2019 Robert Habeck (green party) famously said in an interview[1], addressing head of Volkswagen Herbert Diess: "if you can't offer an EV for under 20,000€ by 2025, I fear you'll fail" - seems he was way off - by about a year. > Volkswagen AG revenue for the twelve months ending June 30, 2024 was $351.396B, a 10.2% increase year-over-year. But of course VW has enough buddies in politics that we'll probably just get a huge bailout package for poor Volkswagen, and all the managers can congratulate each other and keep going. [1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/robert-habeck-kritisiert-elektro-strategie-von-volkswagen-a-1266084.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/robert-habeck-...

Cumpiler69 2y ago
>OK WTF ist most of this? How about not targeting the upper market during inflation? Why? The upper class is the one least affected by inflation. Just look how the stock market is doing. Even in bad times, luxury brands are selling just fine, this has been proven time and time again. Have you seen sales of Bugattis, Ferraris or McLarens slowing down? The problem is, VW is not a luxury brand, it's an expensive commodity, making it the first thing avenge people axe in tough times.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  Then how did we end up with Volkswagen's situation? Selling 100 cars for 20k each sounds better than selling 2 for 200k.

rdtsc 2y ago

Hopefully it's about how to make their cars more reliable. /s Somehow Mercedes owners I know always have their car in the shop complaining how expensive it is to own a Mercedes and how often the fancy little features they have always break down.

wongarsu 2y ago
Obviously there are exceptions, but it's a common theme that expensive cars are expensive to own. You get to beta-test all the fancy new features before they trickle down to cheaper cars, and ease of construction or maintenance take a backseat to other concerns. Of course you can always get the worst of both worlds by buying a used formerly-expensive car. You get all the difficult and expensive maintenance for features that either didn't pan out or that everyone already has the more robust version of.
tim333 2y ago
My one is packed with not strictly necessary gadgetry and while well made, replacement bits are not terribly cheap. Like the first thing was the rear left ride height sensor broke and I've never previously even had a ride height sensor on a car.

wslh 2y ago

The cynic in me is already asking: where are the flying cars? They were at the top in F1 until 2021.

bobthepanda 2y ago
Unless energy becomes significantly cheaper we are unlikely to see personal flying cars, and that’s also before you put all the car crashes that happen today and put them above people’s heads.
- wslh 2y ago
  Please take it as a metaphor of how you can spend USD 8b/year.
  - 6510 2y ago
    https://www.pal-v.com/en/ https://www.pal-v.com/en/
- masklinn 2y ago
  > we are unlikely to see personal flying cars There's already a few being developed, but that's not going to be for the peons e.g. pal-v started taking orders for Liberty this year, and apparently the price tag is somewhere between half and a mil.
andrepd 2y ago
Cars already kill two million people per year, plus another two maimed, plus pollution. Are you sure you want flying cars? :)
6SixTy 2y ago
Thing about flying cars is that you can either have a good car or a good aircraft. Having both combined is worse at both and more expensive at both. Not to mention the headache of dealing with the FAA and whoever does vehicles to get it air and road worthy. In any case, we have helicopters which embodies the spirit of a flying car

up2isomorphism 2y ago

The fundamental problem is building a good car and letting customers changing a new Mercedes every couple of years are very different goals.

nashashmi 2y ago

Apart from the sinister assumptions one could make about the spending, I assume that Mercedes is obviously waisting a whole lot of money on this. Why? Because trying to merge electrical technology with mechanical technology in a highly safety-demanding environment means rigorous testing before 5 year old tech makes its way into the market only to be superseded by newer technologies that can be installed separately. The culture of invent and fail fast just doesn’t work here.

tim333 2y ago
They've been doing this for 139 years so have probably figured that. Come a long way from the Benz Patent-Motorwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen

panick21_ 2y ago

This is kind of crazy, Tesla at peak spent 4 billion $. And they used spend less then 2 billion $. And remember, Tesla is far more vertically integrated. Tesla has large spend in research for their battery and battery materials manufacturing. The make all their own chips, including even some on the data center. They also build robots. And do much of their own AI work. I must be that Tesla prefers to have some research simply be considered as part of product development. While Mercedes does the opposite.

Cumpiler69 2y ago
Well, Tesla is way more streamlined than the large, old, over-bloated ship that is Mercedes. Love or hate Musk, he knows how to run a very tight ship. While a lot of Mercedes's budget goes to armies of overpaid managers who do nothing except waste time in endless meetings where they either argue and backstab each other, or high-five and backstab each other, in order to advance their careers. Not an environment that breeds innovation and creativity at a high pace. Whatever is left goes to engineers that do actual work.
alphabettsy 2y ago
Mercedes might be bloated, but they also make over a dozen different vehicles including some commercial vehicles. They also, in my opinion, make vehicles at a level of quality and experience that Tesla can’t match especially at the mid to high-end.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Quality has to do with production and checking. Mercedes uses much the same methods and tools as everybody else. And in terms of interior quality, are you gone tell me they spend billion on research on how to make the interior nice? That literally makes no sense. More different vehicles doesn't really make sense either. If you go watch some teardowns on YT, you will see that most vehicles are on the same platform, and use very similar methods. More vehicles increases your cost, but not that much in R&D. What does cost if they are pushing, ICE, PHEV, EV and HEV at the same time.

encoderer 2y ago

Mercedes’ cheapest cars are about the same as a Camry but when you spend more you really do see this r&d spending in the product. I’ve owned 4 - expensive to maintain but wonderful to drive. I would say, you really only notice it when you leave your Mercedes behind and rent a Kia/Jeep/etc. I would like a touchscreen though - in addition to the buttons.

okdood64 2y ago
Same with the BMWs I've owned (2009 to 2019 MYs). Is cost of ownership (maintenance & tires) cheap? Not really. Do they have a lot of mechanical issues? Not really. Does it feel like a rock solid, purpose built machine that is enjoyable to drive with a great infotainment system? YES. I will say the little electrical gremlins can be annoying and pricey to fix, but I'm okay with it. I've owned Mazdas too which were 80% as great and don't have those problems, but with a little bit less "solidity".

chucke1992 2y ago

I wonder how much of it goes into "pension funds". As long as Mercedes (and any other old car companies) as not cutting their staff and pipelines, they will never be competitive with Tesla or Chinese companies. They have a lot of inertia but their development processes are too outdated at this point.

creativeSlumber 2y ago

> The most mechanical innovation we saw was a new type of brake for EVs. Although Mercedes says that EVs typically use regenerative braking for 98 percent of their decelerations, they still need friction brakes for that last 2 percent—which tend to be critical needs. The reason is simple: typical EV regen can provide a maximum of 290 kW of braking power, while a maximum 1G plus stop might require 2200 kW. >But because these friction brakes are not used much, their rotors tend to rust, leading to noise during application, as well as degraded appearance. And they still produce brake dust. >To solve these problems, Mercedes is developing what it calls In-Drive Brakes. The idea is to move the brakes from the wheels to inside the electric drive motor at either end, where the half-shafts emerge. The prototype is shown on the rear axle, but the concept could work at both ends. >The brake would not be a conventional disc brake but rather something that looks like the clutch in a manual transmission. There would be a disc that spun with the half-shaft connected to each wheel. This disc would have friction material on most of each side near the periphery and with something that looked like a non-rotating flywheel on each side. An annular hydraulic cylinder would press the assembly together causing the rotating friction disc to drag on the two fixed plates to slow the car. > Since this assembly would be fully enclosed in a housing at each end of the motor housing, the two fixed plates would have liquid cooling passages to remove the heat generated by the braking. A small sump at the base of each brake housing would serve to collect the brake dust generated. mercedes benz innovations future technologies 2024, in drive brake Mercedes-Benz > The goal would be for these brakes to last for the life of the car. Being enclosed, they would be quiet. And being inboard, they would leave the wheels clean, reduce unsprung weight, and allow greater freedom for wheel designers, who would no longer have to worry about getting cooling air into the brakes. This is NOT an innovation. The initial mentioned problem of brake discs possibly rusting because they are rarely used can be easily address by the car computer periodically using the disc brakes rather than regenerative brakes if those haven't been used recently. Applying the disc brakes a few times every couple of days should not impact the range measurably. They are making an easily reparable wear item such as brakes, almost cost prohibitive (labor costs) to replace by putting it inside depths of the electric drive unit. You now have to disable and disconnect high voltage battery , pullout the electric motor (usually include the motor, differential gear units, inverters in the same unit so it is similar to pulling out an engine in a ICE car), then take apart that engine, replace the friction clutches used for breaking, and then reverse the whole process to put it all back together. The only thing this is designed to do is to sell more cars every x years by making cars harder to repair. The funny sad thing is; this is clear anti-consumer activity ironically developed with consumers (tax payers) money using tax write-off for R&D. This type of thing is also why electric cars have a bad reputation at the moment. They depreciate so fast because the the greedy companies design them to make it impossible to repair economically, and insurance companies write them off after the tiniest accident/issue.

Szpadel 2y ago

> The 800-volt battery used in the upcoming new CLA has its 912 cells wired in series. That means that if one cell is subpar, the entire string loses efficiency. If each cell were attached to one of these new converters, its four-volt output could be increased to 800 volts and they could all be wired in parallel. And a deficient cell would have a much smaller effect. This is wrong in so many levels. It's probably 4x 228 in series so each cell would have about 3.5V nominal voltage to get 800V We put more and more in series for a reason, EV have peak power like 200kW, it's 250A already for 4V that is claimed here it would be 50000A, cables to handle this would be heaviest thing in the car. I don't think this converter is able to boost voltage, that would be waste of components, it's for sure meant for stepping down 800V to 12/24/48V used for the rest of the car in low voltage system. I get it that journalist cannot be specialists in every topic but I feel that they should consult it with someone before publishing

kkfx 2y ago

Honestly? So far the most problematic EVs I've seen are from Mercedes, Tesla and South Koreans EVs suffer much less, Chinese EVs much, much, much less... I do not know who much investments have all automakers but...