Photo: catalin garmacea
In the wake of the Volkswagen ‘dieselgate’ scandal, attention paid to this kind of combustion seems higher than ever. And that’s not necessarily a good thing, as Mercedes clearly points out, recent info claiming that the Stuttgart-based manufacturer plans to drop it altogether.
A source close to the management board and familiar with Autoblog claims that shortly we could see diesels dropped entirely from the line-up of the three-pointed star brand and replaced with plug-in hybrids. While this may seem like a surprise at first, it has been in the making for quite some time now.
If you take a look at all the new concepts that the Germans released all of them have been either fully electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids of sorts. The reasons are rather obvious too.
While diesels may offer better torque and mpg numbers, they are still really complicated to make and expensive to research. The main issue is keeping them as eco-friendly as possible as their emissions have a different composition compared to their petrol counterparts.
To do so, manufacturers have employed various means to counter releasing them into the atmosphere, such as using particulate filters or additives such as AdBlue, for example.
All of this might not be worth the trouble in the end and as battery and electric motors evolve, they could provide similar mpg numbers without the pollution.
At the same time, Mercedes plans to introduce even more technology on its future models, to make them more user-friendly and easier to drive. One of these would be an ‘active chassis’, but the source declined to go into details as to what that would imply.
At the moment, Mercedes-Benz is offering adaptive dampers as does most of the industry but that definitely wouldn’t be enough to make future cars qualify as having ‘adaptive chassis’ so we’ll have to wait and see exactly what that means when it comes out.
If you take a look at all the new concepts that the Germans released all of them have been either fully electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids of sorts. The reasons are rather obvious too.
While diesels may offer better torque and mpg numbers, they are still really complicated to make and expensive to research. The main issue is keeping them as eco-friendly as possible as their emissions have a different composition compared to their petrol counterparts.
To do so, manufacturers have employed various means to counter releasing them into the atmosphere, such as using particulate filters or additives such as AdBlue, for example.
All of this might not be worth the trouble in the end and as battery and electric motors evolve, they could provide similar mpg numbers without the pollution.
At the same time, Mercedes plans to introduce even more technology on its future models, to make them more user-friendly and easier to drive. One of these would be an ‘active chassis’, but the source declined to go into details as to what that would imply.
At the moment, Mercedes-Benz is offering adaptive dampers as does most of the industry but that definitely wouldn’t be enough to make future cars qualify as having ‘adaptive chassis’ so we’ll have to wait and see exactly what that means when it comes out.
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