File this under “I could see this coming”. And probably not just me, but anyone who was car-sentient from the mid 70s through the mid-80s.
This is was car companies did last time the fuel excrement hit the fan, and I’ve been waiting for the the first of them to announce this, although I’m a little surprised that Mercedes bit first. I thought it would have been Chrysler, since bolting a turbo onto their venerable four banger and dropping that mill into seeming everything that rolled off of their assembly lines when Lee Iacoca was running the joint is what kept them solvent (and the American tax payers off the tab for that loan) back in the Regan era.
Due to pending carbon dioxide emissions regulations in Europe, Thomas Weber, Merc board member in charge of R & D, announced that every model in the 2010 Mercedes lineup will offer a turbocharged engine. And, as you would expect, the turbo’d engines will feature smaller displacements for reduced fuel consumption, with the turbos providing increased power on-demand.
It would seem that this is the first shot from Mercedes on a very ambitious plan. They want to have all of their vehicles to be capable of operating on either biofuels, hydrogen or electricity by mid-decade.
Good for them, and in a lot of ways, Mercedes is just the car company to do this sort of thing. Meeting the demands of the environment along with those of rising energy costs is not something for the thin of talent in the engineering department, and Mercedes is, after all, an engineering company first and foremost.
If they lead the way and show signs of success, other auto manufacturers will follow suit, and that will be good news for us, the car guys of the planet, as well as the planet itself.
Source autoblog-green.
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