AUGUST 18, 2009, 6:30 P.M. ET
Can Mercedes Keep Its Luxury-Car Edge?
By JOSEPH B. WHITE
The 2010 Mercedes-Benz E550 coupe is a new car in every way. Daimler AG's Mercedes hasn't offered a two-door E class in years. The car's design pushes the envelope, at least by Mercedes's standards, and it offers safety technology at the outer reach of what's possible in a production car.
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At the same time, the E550 coupe feels like a time traveler that landed by accident in 2009 when it was aiming for 2004.
Those are contradictory statements, but that's how the luxury car business is right now.
Since the early years of the auto industry, the makers of premium cars have tended to define "premium" as offering outsize portions of room, power and road presence. Anyone who goes to an exclusive car show such as the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, which celebrated its 49th anniversary last weekend, or to a more populist and approachable car rodeo such as the Woodward Dream Cruise, also last weekend, will see how that luxury-equals-power (and size) equation played out from 1950s-era Cadillacs to modern-day Bentleys.
Luxury Fuel-Sippers
By the standards of the 1950s or 1960s, most of today's luxury cars are fuel-sipping, unassuming rides. By the standards that the U.S. government has demanded of the auto industry, many of today's premium luxury vehicles look old-fashioned.
Consider the E550 coupe. I don't know whether long-time Mercedes fans will appreciate what Mercedes calls the E coupe's "edgy design with cubist cues." My opinion is that the car looks fast and elegant at rest.
But after the exterior—which is curvy and fast where old-school Benzes were angular and blocky—the E550's most prominent feature is the 382-horsepower, 5.5-liter V-8 engine under the hood. This engine, plus a seven-speed transmission, can get you from stopped to 60 miles per hour in five seconds, Mercedes says.
On the highway, the speed comes with a muffled rumble—not the gorgeous roar you get with a BMW. But that is the Mercedes way. If you want taut steering or like to take your car out to a race track, you probably aren't a Benz customer.
The Fuel Penalty
The catch is that the big engine and the power exact a penalty in fuel efficiency. This Benz, which isn't the heaviest or most powerful in the brand's lineup, is rated at 15 miles per gallon in the city and 23 on the highway, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures that came with the car, with a combined 18 miles per gallon.
Put another way, the 2010 E550 coupe is enough of a gas guzzler to qualify for the government's "cash for clunkers" program. So is one of the E550 coupe's direct competitors, the 360-horsepower BMW 650i coupe (also rated at 18 mpg in combined city/highway driving by the EPA).
To be fair, the E550 has many features that separate it from a run-of-the-mill car, besides its $54,650 base price. Among them: a system that monitors the driver's behavior in 70 ways, and sounds alarms if it appears the driver is falling asleep.
Another system uses the optional radar-assisted cruise control not just to maintain a set distance behind a car in front, but to automatically apply the brakes. If the system thinks you are about to rear-end the guy in front in 1.6 seconds, it applies 40% brake pressure. If a crash seems to be 0.6 seconds away, it applies the brakes all the way. You will probably still hit the other guy, but not as hard. For when you aren't crashing into other people, the E550 offers a $6,350 package of options that includes a high-definition radio.
Short-Term Exclusivity
The problem, for Mercedes, is that you can also get collision-warning systems that apply the brakes (at least partially) in a car like Ford Motor Co.'s Lincoln MKS. You say the Lincoln isn't in the same league? Maybe not. But depending on how you equip it, it's also roughly $15,000 less than a loaded E550. Electronic gadgets such as radar-assisted cruise control or blind-spot hazard detection are falling down the technology-cost curve so fast that premium brands have only slits for windows of exclusivity on much of this hardware.
The longer-term challenge for brands such as Mercedes and Lincoln—and Lexus and Cadillac and BMW and all the rest—is whether American consumers' values will change.
The mass-market Detroit and Japanese brands have no choice but to hope that an ever-larger share of American car buyers stop equating "premium" with 400 horsepower and relatively low fuel-economy scores, because the forthcoming 35-mpg fleet fuel economy standards will make it difficult for companies such as General Motors Co., Toyota Motor Corp. or Ford to sell a lot of overpowered gas guzzlers. (GM, controlled by the U.S. government, made a point earlier this month of highlighting a plan to build a new, smaller Cadillac, although it also says it will develop a larger Cadillac as well.)
German luxury car makers face their own regulatory pressures at home, and are working to improve the efficiency of their cars with advanced diesel technology, more-efficient gasoline engines, and gas-electric hybrids and other alternatives.
But at least for a while, they could be able to go on selling cars such as the E550, thanks to a proposal by the Obama administration to give a break on fuel-economy standards to brands that sell fewer than 400,000 vehicles a year in the U.S.
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