Daimler is among one of the few major automakers with aggressive all-electric vehicle plans. The German automaker recently announced acceleration of electric car plans by 3 years and that they will spend $11 billion on 10 models by 2022.
They are backing this up with a new battery factory, which they officially unveiled today.
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Logistic companies are increasingly finding it economical to convert their fleet to electric vehicles, especially for urban routes. Daimler is early in the segment with its Mercedes-Benz vans and it now announced an important contract that will help them kickstart the effort.
They will make 1,500 all-electric Mercedes-Benz vans for Germany’s largest independent logistic firm, Hermes.
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Exciting news coming out of Germany today. Mercedes-Benz announced that it started small series production of its first all-electric heavy truck, the Urban eTruck, and launched trials with customers in order to test the vehicle’s capacity on urban routes.
The company has been moving quickly on this project. After unveiling the prototype in September 2016, it’s already on the roads and in the hands of customers.
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As part of its shareholder letter posted ahead of its earnings call today, Tesla demonstrated its catastrophic affect on the US luxury car market with a simple table. If you start at the bottom, the market is at about 100,000 cars a year and it’s basically unchanged from 2014 to 2015.
The market is for “large luxury” cars and includes not only the Model S but Audi’s A7 and A8, BMW’s 6 and 7 series, the Jaguar XJ, Lexus LS Mercedes CLS and S Class and the Porsche Panamera. Each of these models has fallen in sales from almost 5%-over 15% from 2014-2015. Where did these sales go?
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Mercedes unveiled an interesting new concept at the Frankfurt Motor Show: a sedan which can change its features automatically from design mode to aerodynamic mode once it reaches a speed of 80 km/h (50 mph). The concept is called the IAA, which stands for Intelligent Aerodynamic Automobile, not to be confused with Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung (IAA), also known as the Frankfurt Motor Show, at which the concept is being unveiled.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlhGE7N0poM]
