The adoption of electric cars will spread out only increase only when customer concerns around battery charging are fully removed, according to Martin Schwenk, MD, Managing Director & CEO, Mercedes-Benz India.
“People always have this fear of their cellphones running out of charge, they don’t want to do that with their cars as well,” he said. says Martin Schwenk, Managing Director & CEO, Mercedes-Benz India.
In an exclusive interaction, with The Hindu, he said, “The EV adoption will increase when cars of decent range are made available and also when the charging infrastructure is provided within 15 minutes of driving distance and not when they are 10 hours away.’’
“Electric cars are more expensive to produce and more expensive to sell, that’s on the production side. On the customer front, you can’t walk around with your cars like you do with your cellphones, he said.
Strong future for EVs
“However, for sure, I see a strong future for electric cars. There’s already a government push, but it will take time for customer demand to pick up. Until such time, the strongest option is diesel, which is more reliable, fuel efficient by 25% than petrol and it also leaves less carbon footprint compared with petrol engines,’’ he added. In his commentary On market outlook, Mr. Schwenk also said there was a strong trend towards SUVs in global markets across thearound the globe. “It will be a strong year for Mercedes-Benz in India as well. [The year] 2020 will be a year of SUVs for us.’’
Mercedes-Benz currently offers the largest SUV portfolio in the luxury car segment with 8 SUVs.
As per Schwenk, the car maker will launch 10 new models in India this year, in all segments, from super sports cars, SUVs, limousine and to electric cars, starting with EQC, a luxury electric SUV, scheduled for launch in April.
The German auto maker on Tuesday launched two variants of, 300d 4MATIC diesel and 300 4MATIC petrol, of its `Made in India’ GLC Coupé. The local production of the GLC Coupé is expected to cater to an increasing demand for the SUV Coupe, as per the company.
``It is a coupe, stylish and sporty and it comes with lot of features of a connected car. We are offering it both in petrol and in diesel to cover a wider audience of customers. Most of the tech development, including work around MBUX, for this car was done out of Bengaluru,’’ added Schwenk.
GLC Coupe comes with MBUX, Mercedes-Benz User Experience, an intelligent voice control with natural speech recognition capabilities. Though MBUX supports 23 languages globally, in India it is available only in English. ``More languages in India? Well, that is a possibility which we will be looking at, going forward.’’
GLC 300 d Coupé has a BS 6 In-Line 4 cylinder diesel engine that churns out 245 hp power and 500 Nm of peak torque| 0 – 100 km/h in 6.6 seconds while GLC 300 Coupé has a BS 6 In-Line petrol engine that produces 258 hp and 370 Nm of torque | 0 – 100km/h in 6.3 seconds.
Mercedes-Benz GLC 300 4MATIC is priced at Rs 62.70 lakh, and the GLC 300d 4MATIC is priced at Rs 63.70 lakh (all prices are ex-showroom, except Kerala).