Mercedes: We're Ditching Dinosaur Juice by 2015

Yeah, you read that right. They say they're phasing out petroleum-based powerplants in 7 years. The boys and girls in Stuttgart must read this blog (/snark). Here's the news in a quite decent article from Murdoch's The Sun (UK):

MERCEDES are aiming to end the need for filling your fuel tank with petrol or diesel within just SEVEN YEARS.

The German firm are determined to make their model range run on alternative fuels - to improve costs, become more eco-friendly and because the oil supply will eventually run out

There are 50million jobs worldwide associated with the car and more than 80 per cent of goods are transported by road.

Mercedes are convinced that these two crucial areas of industry can be saved by making vehicles independent of crude oil - to improve costs, become more eco-friendly and because the oil supply will eventually run out.

The company have already spent £2million on their new long-term Sustainable Mobility plan and are set to invest a further £7billion before 2014.

This includes making current engines even cleaner and more fuel-efficient while increasing the amount of hybrids, emission-free electric cars and clean-fuel gas engines and the further development of battery and hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Mercedes will drip-feed different forms of more eco-friendly vehicles into our showrooms as and when the technology has been developed over the next decade - but the process begins towards the end of this year... (lots more detail)

From the Otto engine to whatever's next. Welcome to Mooonshot-ville, M-B. Gottlieb and Wilhelm would be proud.

Okay, I just went and looked in archives and since Benz' F700 concept is so skit-skat bat-lookin I'll post this picture and pat myself on the back some more....

I once wrote somewhere that the problem with Daimler's and Chrysler's merger was that they hadn't lived in sin together. Not to any meaningful degree anyway, and, without a simple requirement: Once enough hot, rough, draining and sweaty rapid prototyping had steamed up the windows and, uh, "preferences" were known (Dirty Secret Soulmates!), the marriage (we don't do "deal" here, baby) should have been signed in blood, on a dog-eared 1969 copy of June Autoweek. Maybe cigars or Don Shermans afterwards. But definitely Jaeger. Lots of it. And Strohs. And Moet. Shooken up and sprayed wildly. Then a wild orgy of kimono-opening top to bottom with get out jail free cards from accounting and PR.

And then, something really good: Let's make catalytic converters obsolete in 20 years. While cranking out the baddest, sexiest rides since, since.... well, forever. Now go!

Something really good. But 7 years is quite nice and oddly symmetrical. We did the moon in about that time--Sept 1962 to July 1969, starting with Kennedy's speech at Rice University: