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According to foreign media reports, Ola K ä llenius, chairman of the board of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, said in an interview with German media that Mercedes-Benz will make China, the world's largest car market, the center of the next-generation electric vehicle program starting in 2025.

In 2021, Mercedes-Benz proposed a "all-electric" strategy, with a nine-year investment of more than 40 billion euros, with the goal of accounting for 50% of sales of pure electric and plug-in hybrid models by 2025, and each new model will launch a pure electric version. Over the next two years, Mercedes-Benz launched a number of new EQ cars, but with less than two years to go before 2025, 90 per cent of Mercedes-Benz's sales still come from fuel models.

According to official figures, Mercedes-Benz sold 1.0192 million vehicles worldwide in the first half, up 5 per cent from a year earlier, of which 102600 pure electric vehicles (BEV) were sold, up 121 per cent from a year earlier, accounting for 10.07 per cent of total sales.

As Mercedes-Benz's first pure streetcar, EQC sales are very poor. Take the Chinese market as an example, it sold a total of 156vehicles in the first half of the year, which is the worst domestic model of Mercedes-Benz, while the sales of EQA and EQB are also very mediocre, with sales of 1767 and 2735 in the first half of the year. EQA, EQB and EQC are essentially "oil-to-electricity" models, even in the case of substantial concessions in the end market, they have not been recognized by Chinese consumers.

Beijing Mercedes-Benz EQE officially went public in August 2022, with a price range of 52.8-585000 yuan. Beijing Mercedes-Benz EQE SUV was launched in May 2023 and is regarded as an important model in the territory of Mercedes-Benz electric vehicles. EQE SUV positioning pure electricity medium and large luxury SUV, for the first time, the whole system is equipped with standard dual motors and intelligent just-in-time four-wheel drive system 4MATIC, with a price range of 48.6 ~ 630600 yuan. Figures show that EQE sold 3355 vehicles in the first half of the year, while EQE SUV sold 1533 in June.

Today, China is not only the largest new energy vehicle market in the world, but also the largest single market of Mercedes-Benz in the world. whether it can make a breakthrough in China's new energy market is related to the success or failure of Mercedes-Benz's transformation.

On April 12, Minister of Industry and Information Technology Jin Zhuanglong met with Kang Linsong, chairman of the board of directors of Mercedes-Benz Group, and his party in Beijing to exchange views on the business development of Mercedes-Benz Group in China and the application and support of advanced technologies such as L3 self-driving. Kang Linsong said that Mercedes-Benz Group is willing to continue to increase investment in China and deepen cooperation with Chinese business partners in R & D, production, procurement and other fields.

In addition, Mercedes-Benz will continue to increase investment in the Chinese market. In 2023, Mercedes-Benz will launch six pure electric and plug-in hybrid models in China, including the new EQS pure electric SUV and the new EQE pure electric SUV. By the end of 2023, Mercedes-Benz's new energy product matrix in China will reach 17.

The opportunism of "changing oil to electricity" can only show that Mercedes-Benz imagines new energy too simply, enters this new track with the "arrogant posture" of the fuel truck era, and misjudges its own brand Rank, so that it is caught in a dilemma. Nowadays, although luxury car brands such as ideal, Ultimate and Polar Krypton are facing various problems and difficulties, they are also survivors under the big waves of the new energy racetrack, and have obvious differentiation advantages in product positioning.

Throughout the 40 years of development of China's automobile industry, today's automobile consumption has long bid farewell to the shortage era of "you must be". Mercedes-Benz's overconfidence in its own brand, in order to save R & D costs and shorten the development cycle, will undoubtedly put Chinese consumers in the position of "stupid people with a lot of money".

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