Where is Mercedes-Benz in the UK today?
We are the “new luxury” brand, with Audi and BMW as premium. We have grown by 34% through the recession. It was worth working hard in a difficult market.
We lost quality in the early 2000s, distracted by the Chrysler involvement. Now it’s fixed and we’re the fastest growing premium brand. In 2002 Mercedes-Benz was the no. 1 premium brand in the UK. By 2010, Audi and BMW had overtaken us.
We were weak in fleet because we switched it on and off. We were badly advised to use fleet as an overflow valve. Now we make offers available to all the major players and we are more consistent. Daily rental is useful as “rolling advertising”, but it needs control.
How do you expect the Daimler collaboration with Renault-Nissan to develop?
We do not have a merger with Renault-Nissan, but we do have, as BMW has with Peugeot, a select co-operation. I think that is controllable and it also helps to keep some costs at a reasonable level. We don’t take any major Renault element and just put it unchanged into a Mercedes-Benz, but create module elements. Then each partner uses them in different ways.
That’s similar to what Volkswagen is doing. You could have lengthy discussions about what an Audi being nothing else other than a Passat. But it is different, there are major elements that are shared, but then the question is what do you do with them? Some of us buy the same ingredients at Tesco and then we go cooking and the results might be very different.
Car2go was one of the pioneering car sharing schemes. What plans do you have for it in the UK?
When Mercedes came up with the car2go model I loved it. You load the app on your smart phone, then it shows you where the car is parked, it leads you to the car, you punch in the code and then you drive. You have to bring the car back into the defined urban area, not where you picked it up from and then you just pay for the time you use it.
We’ve started recently here in London. I thought, you just go to Boris Johnson and negotiate. He’s a mighty, powerful man. But you have to negotiate borough by borough to get the permit to park the cars there. So you have to talk to 33 boroughs. We started with three last December and we’re now in nine and we’re across the entire city of Birmingham as well. Birmingham is much easier. The parking charges from the authorities are factored into the equation. In London it’s slightly different borough to borough, but you can park in any council owned bay free of charge with a car2go car because that’s part of the 35p per minute rental rate. In Birmingham you can park more or less anywhere because it’s all one authority and that’s the same with other car2go cities around the world. The target is to get into the majority of London boroughs.
In the UK they are all mhd smarts, so they are all stop/start, petrol powered coupes and it’s a specific model line built at the factory so the car2go spec has solar panels in the roof to power the on-board diagnostics, where the key lives and the smart card reader on the windscreen.