The global slowdown in demand for electric vehicles has forced Mercedes-Benz management to be pessimistic about their production plans: even in Europe, where the environmental doctrine is especially strict , the company will not be able to completely switch to electric trains by 2030, and models with internal combustion engines will have to be modernized.
In the summer of 2021, Mercedes-Benz announced that by 2030 its product line will consist exclusively of electric vehicles in those markets where this will be possible and in demand (Europe, North America, Japan, etc.). In the fall of the same year, it became known that the German company had stopped work on new plug-in hybrids, which have always been considered a bridge between traditional cars with internal combustion engines and electric vehicles.
This week, Mercedes-Benz published a report on its work in 2023, the figures “in the moment” turned out to be quite good, but the trend is alarming — it turned out that Mercedes-Benz electric vehicles are not selling as well as the company’s management, headed by the CEO, expected Ola Kallenius, and you have to react to this somehow. Bad symptoms were reported throughout the past year, a typical example being the weak sales of the large electric crossover Mercedes-Benz EQS SUV in the USA and, as a result, the decision to transfer its production from the USA to Germany.
Our regular readers are aware that the slowdown in demand for electric vehicles is a global trend: at the beginning of last year it provoked a price war in the Chinese car market; in Europe, the Volkswagen concern was forced to shut down factories for the production of electric vehicles due to insufficient demand for them; American companies General Motors and Ford have sharply weakened the flow of investment in the development and production of new electric vehicles and components for them.
There are many reasons for the global slowdown in demand for electric vehicles, the main ones being high prices, low rates of development of charging infrastructure, insufficient versatility of electric vehicles (including poor suitability for working in harsh climatic conditions) and a decrease in public attention to the environmental agenda against the backdrop of geopolitical upheavals: even the legendary Left activist Greta Thunberg is gradually sliding from an environmental topic to a geopolitical one, so it is geopolitics that now decides everything. In short, now everyone is a little uninterested in electric vehicles.
The Western bureaucracy and large automakers react with a noticeable delay to the changes taking place in the world and cannot sharply put an end to past slogans. So Mercedes-Benz is still verbally striving for complete “greening”: in a fresh presentation, it stated the goal of becoming a completely carbon-neutral company by 2039. This means that the goal of completely switching to electric vehicles has not yet been abandoned, but has been pushed back to a later date. In relation to 2030, the company has made its task much easier: there is no longer talk of full electrification even in key markets, in this sense the strategy has rolled back to the positions outlined before 2021 — to achieve 50% of Mercedes-Benz sales by 2030 consisted of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids (in the Mercedes-Benz presentation they are collectively designated as xEV).
Slide from the Mercedes-Benz presentation dedicated to the results of work in 2023 and plans for the future.
Since in the foreseeable future Mercedes-Benz cannot be powered by internal combustion engines, all “hydrocarbon” models will have to be modernized. It is clear that we are talking mainly about plug-in hybrids — their life will be extended, research and development work (R&D) in this area will be resumed, new products will appear, and in quite large quantities.
And finally, a few numbers. Sales of Mercedes-Benz passenger cars last year amounted to 2,044,051 units. (+0.2% compared to sales in 2022), of which 240,668 units. — these are electric vehicles (+61.3% compared to sales in 2022), 161,275 units. — plug-in hybrids (-12.5%). The total share of xEV in the sales structure at the end of 2023 was 19.7% and the company does not expect that it will grow significantly in 2024.
Mercedes-Benz net profit in 2023 amounted to 14.53 billion euros (-1.9% compared to the result of 2022), while R&D and construction costs increased by 17% to 10 billion euros . At the end of the year, all employees of the company in Germany will receive up to 7,300 euros in the form of a one-time bonus — for ordinary workers this is a lot of money.
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