Mercedes-Benz is in the process of reshaping its entire portfolio of cars. Car and Driver brings a blockbuster claim this morning. The magazine reports, “of the 33 body styles Mercedes currently offers between Europe and the U.S., only 14 will survive.”
The culling would see the end of nearly every coupe and wagon in the Mercedes lineup, the magazine says.
We’ve reached out to Mercedes for confirmation and will update this story as soon as we hear back.
The logic “has to do with the brand’s new understanding of luxury,” Car and Driver says.
An unnamed “senior member of Mercedes-Benz’s strategy team” told the publication, “At the end of the day, we simply don’t need estate cars [wagons] or underperforming two-door offerings to boost” sales volume.
Automotive industry executives, in recent years, have begun to speak of their companies as providing mobility rather than building machines. Mercedes, C&D says, wants to “move even further upmarket” by focusing on automation systems to ease the work of driving rather than producing a huge variety of models.
That means the C-Class and E-Class will lose their 2-door and convertible models “sometime between 2023 and 2024,” the magazine says. The CLS will be dropped in 2024, and the AMG GT will be gone by 2025. The company will continue its GLE and GLC coupes for just one more generation, C&D says.
The report, based on an anonymous source, made our jaws drop. Americans buy few wagons, but it’s hard to picture the Mercedes lineup without them. C&D says we can count on at least one more – the next-generation E-Class is set to appear in 2024 and will include a longroof model. But that, the magazine says, will be “the automaker’s last wagon,” ending its run in 2030.
