Research and development are key factors for market success. A pioneering spirit and technological progress are two of the essential pillars supporting the global success of our products. The goals of DaimlerChrysler’s worldwide research and development departments are to ensure that our customers enjoy individual mobility on a sustainable basis and to put customer-focused innovations on the road, while conserving resources and helping to protect the environment.
25,200 people were working towards achieving exactly these goals at Corporate Research and in the development departments of the Mercedes Car Group, the Chrysler Group, the Truck Group and the Vans and Buses units at the end of 2006. Daimler- Chrysler invested €5.3 billion in research and development in 2006 (2005: €5.6 billion) (see page 55).
Reorganization of research and development activities improves efficiency and quality. Competition among all vehicle manufacturers has become much more intense in the past few years. Correspondingly, the pressure to innovate has increased substantially, particularly in the premium segment. To ensure that we can react more rapidly to changed market conditions, on the one hand we have strengthened the organizational links between our research and development departments, on the other hand we have combined our resources and focused them more closely on the customer-oriented development of our products. The new department Group Research and Mercedes Car Group Development is therefore now responsible not only for Mercedes Car Group products but also – in its role as a competence center for the entire Group – for preliminary development activities at all vehicle divisions. This will allow us to safeguard our innovation expertise and transfer it more rapidly into marketable products, thereby ensuring even greater market success.
Closer cooperation is leading to the standardization and opti- mization of Group-wide processes, as well as bringing products to a more advanced level at an earlier stage. For example, our researchers are working with IT-based simulation tools that allow new components and systems to be tested even before the first
to extensively test the functions of a new component that exists only in the form of a data set, often more intensively than when using a test vehicle. In this way, weaknesses can be identified and eliminated at an early stage, thereby ensuring that a high level of quality is achieved when series production is started.
The vision of accident-free driving – enhanced safety. Safety has been the top priority at DaimlerChrysler for a very long time. This is why our efforts to enhance both active and passive safety are based not only on legal requirements, but also on the actual events that take place during an accident.
One example is the Brake Assist System (BAS), which was pre- sented for the first time in 1996 and has been standard equipment in all new Mercedes-Benz passenger cars since 1997. BAS signifi- cantly reduces vehicle braking distance in critical situations. Some ten years after the launch of BAS, the official German acci- dent statistics for 2006 clearly show that Brake Assist helps prevent accidents. Rear-end collisions caused by Mercedes-Benz passenger cars have been reduced by a further 8% due to BAS. Moreover, the number of severe accidents involving pedestrians fell by 13%.
BAS therefore makes road traffic safer, as does the Electronic Stability Program (ESP), which was introduced by Mercedes-Benz in 1995 and has been standard equipment in all Mercedes-Benz passenger cars since 1999. Accident statistics from Europe, Japan and the United States show that ESP has caused the proportion of accidents due to driver error to fall from 21% to 12%; in other words, it has decreased by nearly a half.
The PRE-SAFE®
braking system introduced in the CL and S-Class in 2006 takes us another step closer to the vision of accident-free driving. If an accident is imminent and the driver has failed to react to visual and acoustic warnings, the new system automatically initiates a partial braking maneuver, in which it generates up to 40% of maximum braking force. If the driver then depresses the brake pedal, the system immediately makes the maximum braking force available. Depending on the situation, these actions will either
imminent, the system automatically initiates an emergency braking maneuver if the driver fails to respond to visual and acoustic alarms. Experts believe that widespread use of all safety systems presently available would halve the number of accidents involving commercial vehicles.
For this reason, Active Brake Assist is a key component of the Mercedes-Benz Safety Technology for Commercial Vehicles initia- tive. This initiative includes the “Safety Truck”, “Safety Coach” and “Safety Van”, which are equipped with every assistance and safety system currently available.
All the aforementioned vehicles are already on the market and are thus making a major contribution to the realization of our vision of accident-free driving.
Energy for the future – ensuring sustainable mobility. Daimler- Chrysler is pursuing a multi-stage approach in order to be able to offer its customers reliable and economical drive concepts over the long term. Combustion engines will maintain their dominant role in the coming years. We will therefore make them more effi- cient, cleaner and more economical, in order to achieve further reductions in emissions, including carbon dioxide. Our objective is to make gasoline engines as efficient as diesel engines, and diesel engines as clean as gasoline engines. A logical step in this direction was taken at the beginning of 2006 with the presentation in the CLS-Class of the world’s first gasoline engine equipped with piezo injectors and a jet-guided direct fuel injection. The new engine uses 10% less fuel than one equipped with a conventional injection system. With regard to diesel engines, our BLUETEC system (see page 106) is the first technology package for passenger cars on the market that reduces emissions of all relevant diesel exhaust components to previously unknown levels.
Our research and development engineers are also working hard on alternative and environmentally friendly fuels such as SunDiesel, which is made from biomass (see page 107).
Hybrid drive systems will become more important in the medium term, which is why we are developing various hybrid concepts,
The most effective and environmentally friendly drive concept for the long term is the fuel cell, which we have been developing intensively for many years now.
Fuel cells for a zero-emission future. Many challenges must be overcome before fuel-cell technology is ready for the mass market, probably some time between 2012 and 2015.
At present, 100 Mercedes-Benz fuel-cell vehicles – passenger cars, Sprinter vans and buses – are being used by customers in normal everyday operations. By the end of 2006, this fleet had accumulated a combined 2.8 million kilometers and 146,800 operating hours.
Evaluation of the collated test data has produced valuable results that will flow into the development of the next generation of fuel-cell vehicles, which will be based on the Mercedes-Benz B-Class and the Citaro fuel-cell bus. Fleet tests in the future will focus on reducing costs further and achieving additional technical improvements in the areas of cold-start capability, vehicle range and power-to-weight ratio.
The Clean Urban Transport for Europe (CUTE) and the Ecological City Transport System (ECTOS) hydrogen projects, both of which are funded by the European Union, have shown that our fuel-cell buses work reliably even under the extreme conditions of everyday use. Due to this success, the European Union decided in favor of a follow-up project called HyFLEET:CUTE, which was launched in January 2006.
In addition to these projects, we cooperate on fuel-cell and hydrogen projects with partners around the world in the energy industry and at government agencies. Such projects include the Clean Energy Partnership (CEP) in Berlin, the California Fuel Cell Partnership (CaFCP) in Sacramento and the Japanese Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Project (JHFC) in Tokyo. These initiatives not only demonstrate the capabilities of fuel-cell vehicles, but also present technologies suitable for producing and distributing hydrogen. The establishment of an infrastructure of hydrogen filling stations is just as important in terms of market readiness as Assistance system for more safety:
The PRE-SAFE®brakes in the
S-Class and CL-Class brake the car automatically if an accident is imminent.