What can the auto industry do to slow down climate change? For example building smaller, lighter, more economical cars. Focusing instead on building heavy luxury sedans and SUVs sounds like a rather strange recipe.
Mercedes wants to do exactly that: The manufacturer abolishes the small car. According to the “Handelsblatt”, the A-Class and B-Class are to be dropped; you don’t make enough profit with them and only want to bring larger, more profitable vehicles onto the market.
The A-Class is too small and too European for America, where they prefer SUVs like the Mercedes GLE, which weighs over 2.3 tons and looks like an angry metal frog that will soon burst due to overpressure. The global SUV obsession is not good news for the climate; if the whole of America drove A-class vehicles instead of trucks, national consumption would be halved. Whereby even the smallest Mercedes is not a light car; the first A-Class from 1997 weighed 1095 kilograms, the current one is between 1350 and 1700 kilograms. If you gain 500 kilos in 25 years, you would think you would have a problem.