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I haven’t worked in a revenue positive company for over 5 years. But prior to that, once a year, someone would sit at my desk asking for anything I did was “new” and how so. In the states, any “research” work is a tax write off. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mercedes is using this as well.

> The 800-volt battery used in the upcoming new CLA has its 912 cells wired in series. That means that if one cell is subpar, the entire string loses efficiency. If each cell were attached to one of these new converters, its four-volt output could be increased to 800 volts and they could all be wired in parallel. And a deficient cell would have a much smaller effect.

This is wrong in so many levels.

It's probably 4x 228 in series so each cell would have about 3.5V nominal voltage to get 800V

We put more and more in series for a reason, EV have peak power like 200kW, it's 250A already for 4V that is claimed here it would be 50000A, cables to handle this would be heaviest thing in the car.

I don't think this converter is able to boost voltage, that would be waste of components, it's for sure meant for stepping down 800V to 12/24/48V used for the rest of the car in low voltage system.

I get it that journalist cannot be specialists in every topic but I feel that they should consult it with someone before publishing

Mercedes’ cheapest cars are about the same as a Camry but when you spend more you really do see this r&d spending in the product. I’ve owned 4 - expensive to maintain but wonderful to drive.

I would say, you really only notice it when you leave your Mercedes behind and rent a Kia/Jeep/etc.

I would like a touchscreen though - in addition to the buttons.

The fundamental problem is building a good car and letting customers changing a new Mercedes every couple of years are very different goals.

I wonder how much of it goes into "pension funds".

As long as Mercedes (and any other old car companies) as not cutting their staff and pipelines, they will never be competitive with Tesla or Chinese companies. They have a lot of inertia but their development processes are too outdated at this point.

Csaba Csere (''Shobba Shedda'' will do in a pinch) has been writing for Car And Driver for ~44 years!

Apart from the sinister assumptions one could make about the spending, I assume that Mercedes is obviously waisting a whole lot of money on this. Why? Because trying to merge electrical technology with mechanical technology in a highly safety-demanding environment means rigorous testing before 5 year old tech makes its way into the market only to be superseded by newer technologies that can be installed separately.

The culture of invent and fail fast just doesn’t work here.

> spends the equivalent of $7.4 to $8.4 billion every year on research and development

Wonder what portion of this is opex masquerading as R&D, hiding behind “equivalent of”

> The most mechanical innovation we saw was a new type of brake for EVs. Although Mercedes says that EVs typically use regenerative braking for 98 percent of their decelerations, they still need friction brakes for that last 2 percent—which tend to be critical needs. The reason is simple: typical EV regen can provide a maximum of 290 kW of braking power, while a maximum 1G plus stop might require 2200 kW.

>But because these friction brakes are not used much, their rotors tend to rust, leading to noise during application, as well as degraded appearance. And they still produce brake dust.

>To solve these problems, Mercedes is developing what it calls In-Drive Brakes. The idea is to move the brakes from the wheels to inside the electric drive motor at either end, where the half-shafts emerge. The prototype is shown on the rear axle, but the concept could work at both ends.

>The brake would not be a conventional disc brake but rather something that looks like the clutch in a manual transmission. There would be a disc that spun with the half-shaft connected to each wheel. This disc would have friction material on most of each side near the periphery and with something that looked like a non-rotating flywheel on each side. An annular hydraulic cylinder would press the assembly together causing the rotating friction disc to drag on the two fixed plates to slow the car.

> Since this assembly would be fully enclosed in a housing at each end of the motor housing, the two fixed plates would have liquid cooling passages to remove the heat generated by the braking. A small sump at the base of each brake housing would serve to collect the brake dust generated. mercedes benz innovations future technologies 2024, in drive brake Mercedes-Benz

> The goal would be for these brakes to last for the life of the car. Being enclosed, they would be quiet. And being inboard, they would leave the wheels clean, reduce unsprung weight, and allow greater freedom for wheel designers, who would no longer have to worry about getting cooling air into the brakes.

This is NOT an innovation. The initial mentioned problem of brake discs possibly rusting because they are rarely used can be easily address by the car computer periodically using the disc brakes rather than regenerative brakes if those haven't been used recently. Applying the disc brakes a few times every couple of days should not impact the range measurably.

They are making an easily reparable wear item such as brakes, almost cost prohibitive (labor costs) to replace by putting it inside depths of the electric drive unit. You now have to disable and disconnect high voltage battery , pullout the electric motor (usually include the motor, differential gear units, inverters in the same unit so it is similar to pulling out an engine in a ICE car), then take apart that engine, replace the friction clutches used for breaking, and then reverse the whole process to put it all back together.

The only thing this is designed to do is to sell more cars every x years by making cars harder to repair. The funny sad thing is; this is clear anti-consumer activity ironically developed with consumers (tax payers) money using tax write-off for R&D.

This type of thing is also why electric cars have a bad reputation at the moment. They depreciate so fast because the the greedy companies design them to make it impossible to repair economically, and insurance companies write them off after the tiniest accident/issue.

This is kind of crazy, Tesla at peak spent 4 billion $. And they used spend less then 2 billion $. And remember, Tesla is far more vertically integrated. Tesla has large spend in research for their battery and battery materials manufacturing. The make all their own chips, including even some on the data center. They also build robots. And do much of their own AI work.

I must be that Tesla prefers to have some research simply be considered as part of product development. While Mercedes does the opposite.

The cynic in me is already asking: where are the flying cars?

They were at the top in F1 until 2021.

Honestly? So far the most problematic EVs I've seen are from Mercedes, Tesla and South Koreans EVs suffer much less, Chinese EVs much, much, much less... I do not know who much investments have all automakers but...

Hopefully it's about how to make their cars more reliable. /s

Somehow Mercedes owners I know always have their car in the shop complaining how expensive it is to own a Mercedes and how often the fancy little features they have always break down.

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… and VW drops 23 billion on RND each year, but I’m not seeing 6x the output compared to Tesla.

OK WTF ist most of this? How about not targeting the upper market during inflation?

> If I had had this tool when ordering my Porsche 911 a few years ago, I probably would have made a different color choice.

Why not focus on what normal people want, like affordable reliable cars, instead of luxury cars with a dozen computers and screens in it where you need to get something fixed twice a year.

Look at fucking Volkswagen being a whiney bitch about sluggish sales when they focused on the upper market too for the past couple years. They just fired a huge amount of staff. Obviously just from the lower ranks, you know, the folks who actually get shit done, to ensure the coke-sniffing managers can still pay themselves huge bonuses for being dumb idiots making the wrong calls.

In 2019 Robert Habeck (green party) famously said in an interview[1], addressing head of Volkswagen Herbert Diess: "if you can't offer an EV for under 20,000€ by 2025, I fear you'll fail" - seems he was way off - by about a year.

> Volkswagen AG revenue for the twelve months ending June 30, 2024 was $351.396B, a 10.2% increase year-over-year.

But of course VW has enough buddies in politics that we'll probably just get a huge bailout package for poor Volkswagen, and all the managers can congratulate each other and keep going.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/robert-habeck-...

Yet they are rumored to be sourcing 2026 CLA engine from Chinese Geely. Nothing agains Chinese companies, but aren't MB suppose to be luxury brand? Geely will probably offer vehicle with same engine, more tech for half the price.