Daimler had forever and a day been a conglomerate with two main industrial businesses. Everybody knows Mercedes-Benz is a luxury tech car company, and Daimler Trucks is the world’s biggest commercial vehicle producer. It comes from the history of the company. Gottlieb Daimler didn’t just invent the car, he invented the truck and all other things that were propelled by a combustion engine back then.
You said you had to reinvent the whole product, the whole car, which is obviously a reference to electric vehicles . There is one more split you could do, and Ford just did something along these lines. They said, “We are going to have an internal combustion business and an EV business. They are going to be different. We are going to split those up so the EV people can focus and our legacy car business can focus.
Let’s look at this in more detail, especially the industrial footprint and the R&D footprint. You are absolutely right that our high-tech, electrified, combustion-based vehicles will continue to produce positive cash flows and delight customers around the world for many years to come, but the destination that we are going is an all-electric destination. Look at production for a second. We have plants where we build the cars, and we have plants where we build the powertrain.
None of us have a crystal ball, so we don’t know exactly what the dynamics in the big market are going to be in 2030. What is Europe going to look like? What is North America going to look like? Is China going to be the biggest market? What about other important markets like Japan, Korea, and so on? At this stage we have to take a little bit of a guess. You have to strategically decide who you want to be, and if you are going to try to make the market or wait for the market.
How do I make decisions? I can’t just pull a manual out of the drawer and read the steps. I would say I gather a lot of information. I am curious and listen to a lot of people, and I like differing opinions so that I’m not just talking to a bunch of yes-men. If you are at the top of a company in a hierarchy, people have a tendency to tell you what they think you want to hear. I try to go through that challenge of speaking to people I know will say what I don’t want to hear.
I think we have come to the end of that era now, and it is almost like you start with a white sheet of paper. We call it MBOS, the Mercedes-Benz Operating System. “Let’s stand back here and see if this is going to work as we get more processing power, better sensors, and better software. We can use artificial intelligence; we have a learning vehicle.” We said, “No, that American quilt of ECUs that you have to sew together is not going to work. It is going to be too complicated.
A brilliant idea.
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