#DAS09 At the unveiling of 2010 Mercedes-Benz E-Class at Detroit's Park Cadillac Hotel on Saturday night, Dr. Thomas Weber, a research/design director on Daimler-Benz's board of management, spent a lot of time talking about the company's Concept BlueZero cars. The BlueZero E-Cell, F-Cell and E-Cell Plus concepts are all variations on the electric-car theme and all are built on Benz's B-Class platform.
Though the E-Class isn't on display in Cobo, the all-electric BlueZero E-Cell is in the Mercedes booth, though curiously it's adjacent to an animated display of the SL63's 518-horsepower, 6.3-liter V8 and seven-speed automatic. So electricity is really the future, hmm?
Still, Daimler has announced that it intends to produce lithium-ion batteries in-house, instead of using an outside supplier, so there's a level of commitment here. Also, the sandwich floor structure of the B-Class is apparently ideal for packaging lithium-ion batteries.
The difference between each of the Concept BlueZero cars amounts to range. The BlueZero E-Cell, the car in the booth, is an all-electric car powered exclusively by a 47-hp lithium-ion battery pack -- apparently two packs will fit in the car's floor structure. And we'd guess you'd need both packs to meet Mercedes' claim of zero to 60 mph in under 11 seconds. Range is 125 miles, and in the interest of preserving that, top speed is limited to 93 mph.
The Concept BlueZero F-Cell presumably uses just one of the battery packs, as it also has a hydrogen tank and a fuel cell stack. Its range is 258 miles.
Meanwhile, BlueZero E-Cell Plus is a series hybrid like a Chevy Volt. It uses the Smart Fortwo's 67-hp three-cylinder gas engine as a range extender (to drive the electric motor and recharge the battery pack). Its claimed max range is an utterly livable 375 miles.
None of these cars is going into production anytime soon. Given the power density limitations of current lithium-ion battery technology, a Mercedes engineer tells us, electric cars still need to be very small. So Mercedes is planning to build an electric version of the smaller A-Class sometime in 2010. We'd guess the production run will be very small, too. -- Erin Riches, Senior Editor
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