No one stays on top of the world forever. Empires crumble. The stars of today are the has-beens of tomorrow. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that. Mercedes-Benz has long been the luxury car in the United States, but after usurping the domestic luxury brands it, too, is on shaky ground.
I say all this because Mercedes-Benz is naming a new sales captain, and the hope is that he’ll be able to turn the ship around. Can he do it? Maybe! It’s not like things are great at German rival Volkswagen, though the company has the Rivian deal to help. And Volvo? Geely-owned brands seem to be the ones most disrupted by tariffs, which is causing problems in Europe.
A lot of the disruption at major automakers has to do with electric cars, which leads to our final story about gas stations and EV stations and when the latter will overtake the former. It’s sooner than you might think.
Mercedes Has To Fix Its EV Problems If It Wants To Survive
The teens were a great decade for Mercedes. In spite of losing some ground in luxury sedans to Tesla, the brand’s strong mix of crossovers and SUVs led the company to a record in 2015. That year the company sold 380,461 vehicles (if you include Smart and vans), including more than 86,000 copies of the C-Class sedan and 32,550 M-Class SUVs.
Mercedes would go on to have more great years, leading the luxury segment in the United States from 2016 to 2018. Since then? It’s been a little rougher. Beyond Tesla, the German luxury brand has fallen behind a stronger BMW and a surging Lexus.
In 2023, Lexus sold 320,249 vehicles, up 23.8% from 2022, and BMW sold 362,244, up about 9% from the prior year. Over that same period, Mercedes hit 351,746 units sold, an increase of just 0.2%.
All of these companies are trying to compete in the electrified vehicle space, with BMW offering what I think are the best EVs of the three, Lexus offering way more hybrids, and Mercedes-Benz selling an unusual mix of electric cars that are not particularly compelling.
This has caught up with Mercedes this year. In an EV market that’s growing, but at a slower rate than in the past, Mercedes Q2 EV sales were down 36% year-over-year. While sales of the cheaper EQB are up year-over-year through the first half of the year (by about 4%), both the EQE Sedan/SUV (-4%) and EQS Sedan/SUV (-52%) are hurting.
Why is this happening? I think Mercedes continues to build good-to-great gas-powered cars and SUVs for people who want something luxurious. The design language isn’t always to my taste, which may be a net positive for the brand if you’ve ever seen the kind of aesthetic I’m into. I find the interiors, punctuated by neon tones, a bit too Berlin disco. I may be in the minority.
After seeing the S-Class fall to the Tesla Model S it seems like Mercedes was ready to strike back with a whole line of cars under the EQ banner. The first car was the Mercedes EQS sedan, a sort of S-Class for people who wanted an EV, which debuted in 2021 as a production model.
It’s… it’s fine? I cannot make one reasonable argument for buying the EQS. It looks like what the Dodge Intrepid would have become if Daimler had kept Chrysler, but not in a good way. It needs a way larger battery pack to achieve a range that’s worth more than either a Lucid Air or a Model S, mostly because its estimated 35 kWh/100 miles is mediocre.
The cheapest EQS, the 450+, is $104,400, compared to the much better and more efficient Lucid Air Pure, which is now just under $70,000. While the Tesla Model S might be aging, a Model S with an old design is a superior vehicle and only costs $72,990.
The same is true of the EQS SUV and the EQE Sedan/SUV. While not explicitly bad, none of them are better than any of the competition and all are more expensive. The one kind of OK one is the least-EQish, the EQB SUV, which is basically an electrified GLB, though the EQB is still all kinds of meh and expensive.
Actually, there are two good ones. The giant, ridiculous Mercedes-Benz Gwagen EV is cool. The Sprinter EV is also kinda great and I need to write up my review of that vehicle. The difference here is that the G and Sprinter EVs are vehicles that look and feel like modern Mercedes products and not some strange, blobby analogs.
What’s Mercedes doing about this? U.S. sales chief Senol Bayrak is being shipped to Germany and Bart Herring, currently in charge of Canadian operations, is coming back to the United States reports Automotive News.
According to a retailer memo obtained by Automotive News, Herring will be responsible for “driving new- and used-vehicle sales performance” and work in “close collaboration” with Mercedes retailers. Herring also will lead the product team “driving our EV, PHEV & ICE portfolio towards an exciting and sustainable future,” the memo said.
[…]
It’s going to be hard. Mercedes needs a serious rethink of its EV and PHEV products if it wants to be competitive, and they’re so far behind it might take a while.
Volvo Revises Down Sales Estimates Due To EV Tariffs
Geely owns Polestar, Volvo, Lotus, Zeekr, and a few other car brands with eyes on export markets. These plans have been disrupted by a backlash from Western Governments against Chinese-built vehicles.
In the United States, Polestar and Volvo will likely be able to skate by on import/export rules because of domestic production, but that’s not going to help Lotus. Volvo and Polestar are both trying to bring non-Chinese production online, but the company doesn’t think it’ll be able to do it fast enough to avoid a negative impact on sales.
While reporting better-than-expected second-quarter results that sent its shares up 6% in morning trade, Volvo lowered its forecast for sales growth this year to 12%-15% from 15%.
“It’s really driven by tariffs,” CEO Jim Rowan told Reuters. “It’s a short term issue for us, but it is an issue and we’re just going to have to deal with that.”
Volvo is rapidly trying to ramp up its EX30 production in Ghent, Belgium next year to deal with these sudden tariffs.
Is The VW-Rivian Deal Smart?
I mentioned that the VW-Rivian deal was a bad sign for the industry, as it showed even a large company with a lot of engineers like VW couldn’t get out of its own way when it comes to developing the key software required to make modern vehicles.
It’s also a bad sign for other automakers as this might give VW a much-needed leg up in the race to build the car of the future, and not just in the realm of software. Here’s what S&P Global Mobility had to say about the differences in vehicle architecture between the two companies:
According to Richard Dixon, senior principal analyst, E/E and Semi, S&P Global Mobility, Rivian’s E/E architecture is built with a different approach to that of Volkswagen’s, which is necessarily developed on a standing electronic control unit (ECU) and domain architecture that is not well suited to making a pure zone design.
“Rivian’s approach is like Tesla’s — its E/E architecture is designed from a clean sheet with one propulsion system in mind and very little legacy domain-based hardware. The first-generation R1 model has only 17 ECUs, wherein equivalent electric cars will have more than 60. R1’s successor, R2, has only seven ECUs. There are three zones and four main domain controllers and only three ECUs. This is mostly attributed to a ‘pure’ zonal design where the domains and zones take a lot of management of local actuators, removing need for local controllers [ECUs]. This is different from some designs coming from established OEMs, which still carry some domain architectures and yet can’t be free of that need to carry them over for reasons concerning cost of parts requalification, among others,” said Dixon. For this reason, Rivian’s hardware is better or on a par with many of its rivals (outside mainland China), he added.
It sounds like you’re working for your ECUs… simplify, man!
Fast EV Chargers Will Outnumber Gas Stations In 2032
If you think about EV charging as access to electricity, then EV chargers way outnumber gas stations because there are plugs everywhere and most cars will let you slow-charge on a 110v outlet if absolutely necessary.
Fast chargers, though? Not so much. That’ll change in roughly eight years according to this analysis from Bloomberg:
At the current pace, public fast-charging sites will outnumber gas stations in the US in about eight years — but charger momentum is only expected to accelerate. North American operators will spend a collective $6.1 billion on charging infrastructure this year, nearly double their 2023 investment, according to BloombergNEF estimates. That annual spend is expected to double again by 2030.
That’s sooner than I’d have expected.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
I know it’s a BRAT summer, but let’s throw back a little to some vintage Charli XCX and “Boom Clap” from some movie I was too old to care about it when it debuted. I need the energy, a couple of weeks of travel and I’m wiped.
The Big Question
Mercedes, huh? What do we think? What do they need to do?
Tesla is not luxury. Quality are worlds apart
Ugly beach.:-)
i have driven Mercedes EQE350+ and EQS580 as a loaner. there’s nothing wrong with the EV and i like it !
maybe Mercedes EV don’t sell that well cus of prices, ever thought about that?
EQE starts at 75k and EQS starts at 104k, and that’s just the basic with no options added yet.
how many Tesla do you see on the roads costs over 75k ?
insane that between mercedes, lucid and air only one of them has never (unless lucid has some serious explaining to do) built vehicles for a nazi
I think I’m joining a line of other people saying the same thing:
TL;DR;
Mercedes should have spent their time to make the same looking C, E and S cars but with a platform that can have a proper battery, electric motors and/or a hybrid system.
Nobody is buying an electric C-class to help the environment ; it is about image MOSTLY. Just like a lot of Priuses in the early days ; some people didn’t bother to charge and just drove on the range extender and enjoying the tax credits (in Europe especially)