People tend to look at the slow pace with which legacy carmakers are making the shift toward electric powertrains and self-driving systems and mistake it for reluctance.
It's actually just inertia. It's incomprehensibly easier for a startup to mold its entire activity around these two - make it three with ride-sharing - pillars of modern automotive development than it is for an established manufacturer that's been doing things a certain way for more than a century.
They can't just drop everything and start clean. Yes, that's a disadvantage, but companies such as Daimler also have lots of other things going for them, not the least of which are capital and credit. The German giant is able to invest huge sums of money in the development of new technologies while also maintaining a profitable side-business of making fossil fuel-burning cars.
But it's precisely this kind of investment that should be seen as a confirmation that Daimler is taking these new trends very seriously. Take, for instance, the company's Immendingen facility as an example. Stretching over 520 hectares (two square miles), it received investments totaling over 200 million euros ($237 million) to become the test center for future fields such as connected, autonomous, shared & services, and electric.
It's here Mercedes-Benz is honing the EQA and EQS electric models ahead of their imminent release, using the 68 km (42 miles) of tracks built to replicate the streets and roads from all over the world to their finest detail - from the twisty mountain roads of Spain to the Belgian cobblestone.
The clip offers us an insight into the life of a Mercedes-Benz engineer, but also that of an EQA or S test car. These vehicles rarely get time to breathe as they are constantly being put through their paces. Jens ten Brink, the Overall Vehicle Test Engineer featured in the clip, talks about how the charge station in the facility is the most used one in the world, and he's probably not wrong.
You know, we used to think that being an automotive journalist was one of the best jobs in the world. That hasn't changed, but now that we got a taste of what it's like being a test driver for Mercedes-Benz, it's safe to say it's a very close second, right above ice cream taster.
"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie) Full profile
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