MacKenzie

“WHEN THE CEO ANNOUNCES MERCEDES-BENZ IS PREPARING TO DUMP THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE, IT MATTERS”

THIS IS THE Big One. “We are going from ‘EV first’ to ‘EV only’ for our new architectures and cars. By the end of this decade, we will be ready to go 100 percent electric.”

Yeah, yeah… We’ve heard this already from Jaguar and Volvo and others. What’s the big deal? The big deal is that quote came from Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius.

Internal combustion engines have powered Mercedes-Benz vehicles for more than 130 years. But by the time the company celebrates its 140th anniversary, it plans to have reduced its investment in internal combustion engine research and development by 80 percent compared with 2019 levels. And from 2024 on, the only platform architectures under development at Mercedes-Benz will be for electric vehicles.

Mercedes-Benz is a company with a venerable reputation for engineering excellence, a company that can rightly claim to have invented the car. So, when the CEO announces Mercedes-Benz preparing to dump the internal combustion engine, it matters.

After the 2024 launch of the ‘EV-first’ MMA architecture, designed to underpin A- and B-Class sized cars and SUVs with both electric and hybrid powertrains, work on three new ‘EVonly’ architectures will kick into high gear.

MB.EA will be for medium to large vehicles and will eventually replace the conventional MRA platform that underpins the current C-, E- and S-Class cars and SUVs, as well as the bespoke EV platform specially developed for the all-electric EQS and the soon-to-be revealed EQE, along with the SUV variants of both. And AMG.EA will be a dedicated high-performance electric vehicle architecture.

A key element of the Mercedes EV architecture strategy is the development of a modular battery system that consists of uniformly designed components and a standardised vehicle interface. “More than 90 percent of all future Mercedes vehicles will be based on a common battery platform,” says R&D chief Markus Schäfer. “Only two differentiating characteristics will create the necessary variance in terms of range, charging and driving performance: Cell chemistry and height.”

A lot of the 800V powertrain hardware will be common, too, anchored around a new radial permanent magnet e-motor called eATS 2.0, engineered and manufactured in-house by Mercedes. For the electric AMG models, Mercedes will use ultra-high performance axial flux e-motors and control systems developed by Yasa, a British company it acquired in July.

A cross-functional, multi-disciplinary team, supported by specialists from the Mercedes-AMG F1 team, is already working on boosting by 25 percent the energy density of the battery cells Mercedes plans to build in eight new factories. “We instructed them to aim beyond 1000km on one charge,” says Schäfer, “but not by making the battery bigger. Anybody could do that.”

Longer term, says chief technical officer Sajjad Khan, Mercedes is looking at solid-state batteries that, compared with today’s lithium-ion units, are lighter, with double the energy capacity, and can endure more charging cycles over a lifetime.

Mercedes-Benz is going all-in on EVs. Well, almost. Ola Källenius says Mercedes will be ready to go 100 percent electric “where market conditions allow”. But sales and marketing chief Britta Seeger admits the global automotive landscape is changing fast. “Until recently, we expected a moderate development of the global EV market,” she says. “Now, we believe customer preferences will shift even faster. Fully electric vehicles will dominate the luxury

market by 2030.”