“What’s in a name? What we call a rose by any other name would smell as good.” These words, spoken by Juliet in Shakespeare’s great tragedy Romeo and Juliet, imply that names are meaningless. But don’t tell a product manager that, especially an automobile industry manager. Car names follow trends in culture and history, for example The mid-century Atomic Age had powerful one-word American car nameplates that suggested either space travel (Comet, Starfire, Galaxy, Mercury, Taurus) or glamor (Continental, Riviera, Monte Carlo, Eldorado, Monaco while the Europeans remained more so). Realistic, using numbers that have more internal meaning than anything else (2002, 240D, 500, 401, 320iS).
However, once American automakers in the midst of the 1973 Arab oil embargo were forced to downsize their cars en masse, a host of names—from Sedan de Ville to yes, even Eldorado—began to sound more like the names of Wi-Fi hotspots. Seemingly overnight, the sleek aerodynamic appearance of American cars was replaced by a boxy European shape. Despite this, some nameplates—examples include the Chevy Suburban (1935), Honda Accord (1976), Volkswagen Beetle (1938), and Mercedes S-Class (1972)—enjoyed significant staying power.
This goes some way to explaining why Mercedes-Benz has announced a major change in the nomenclature it uses for its electric cars, and if there’s anything Mercedes has going with nomenclature, it’s that it’s consistently inconsistent.
The Stuttgart-based automaker will no longer use the “EQ” prefix for its electric vehicles. The use of the prefix was in direct conflict with Mercedes’ nomenclature policy issued 10 years ago, when it began using lowercase letters to indicate a car’s engine type, such as “d” for diesel and “e” for electric.
The “EQ” prefix has become unwieldy in recent years, because it has created confusion with internal combustion engine vehicles that use one- or two-letter prefixes followed by the class designation. For example, for the E-Class, or E-Klasse in German, there was both the EQE which was an E-Class EV sedan and the EQE SUV which was clearly not a sedan.
The fact that Mercedes’ second-quarter US sales report indicated that combined sales of the EQS sedan and EQS SUV were down 52% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023 didn’t make the clumsy naming scheme any more likable.
Hence the news of another change in Mercedes nomenclature.
“There will be two S-Classes in the future – ICE and electric,” Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius told British car weekly Autocar.
This solution allows the Stuttgart company to drop the EQS name, which apparently did not enjoy the same standing among luxury car buyers as the S-Class.
However, the two new S-Class vehicles will not be based on the same platform. The S-Class EV variant will use the upcoming large MB.EA platform, while the S-Class ICE variant will be based on an upgraded version of the existing MRA architecture.
It is important to note that while Mercedes-Benz initially projected that EV sales would account for more than 20% of its 2,043,800 global sales in 2023, EVs only achieved a market share of 11% at best, despite an overall increase of 73%. in the automaker’s total electric vehicle sales as of 2022.
Given these sales figures, perhaps the Stuttgartians should have used the time and energy spent reworking nomenclature to strategize how to offer low-priced electric cars that could beat out competition from China.
The automaker had previously announced a major change to the nomenclature of its vehicles in 2014 in an attempt to simplify the names of its models. At that time, Mercedes had standardized on a system that constructed model designations from combinations of between one and three capital letters. Different types of energy should be indicated with a lowercase letter. Mercedes also stopped using the BlueTec branding for its diesel engines, reverting to the unadorned ‘D’ as it had been used in the past, as on the 240D, albeit in lower case letters. Hybrid vehicles were to receive an “h” designation, while electric vehicles were to receive an “e” designation.
Before that, the most significant change came in 1993, when the letters “C” and “E” became prefixes for the company’s compact and mid-size sedans.
Source: Autocar
