Mercedes Has Growth Challenges
Mercedes-Benz is completing a decade-long rejuvenation with the new E-Class sedan this month, capping an unprecedented flurry of fresh models that have brought rapid expansion but will make future growth tougher to deliver. The overhaul of Mercedes’ bread-and-better business sedan marks the last major model to get a technology and design upgrade until the next-generation A-Class hatchback rolls out in 2018. By that time, Mercedes will...
Mercedes ‘Robots’ Can’t Keep Up
Mercedes-Benz offers the S-Class sedan with a growing array of options such as carbon-fiber trim, heated and cooled cupholders and four types of caps for the tire valves, and the carmaker’s robots can’t keep up. With customization key to wooing modern consumers, the flexibility and dexterity of human workers is reclaiming space on Mercedes’ assembly lines. That bucks a trend that has given machines the upper hand since legendary U.S....
Students Invent Devices to Battle Snow, Ice, Cold
Boston — Winter is bearing down anew, and Harvard University students have been engineering new ways to deal with it. Eighteen juniors representing several engineering disciplines in professor David Mooney’s problem-solving and design class spent the fall semester inventing a robotic remote-control rooftop snowblower, a superheated icicle cutter and a freeze-resistant doormat. The projects grew out of meetings with the university’s...
Nice Interior, Not Much ‘Zoom’
The 2016 Mazda CX-3 (I give it three out of four stars) aims to add some sporty appeal to the growing class of subcompact crossover SUVs. The CX-3 competes with small SUVs like the Buick Encore, Chevrolet Trax, Fiat 500X, Honda HR-V, Jeep Renegade, Mitsubishi Outlander Sport and Nissan Juke. Its sleek looks suggest an enthusiastic driving experience the drivetrain doesn’t entirely deliver, but the top-of-the-line Grand Touring model...
Wheels: Luxury Car Class Better Take Notice
Rapid advances in technology are undermining traditional notions of automotive luxury — and value. We have visited this theme before in this space. Traditional vendors of automotive luxury and performance have dismissed that assertion — my assertion -— as poppycock. It matters not that a Timex keeps time as well as a substantially more expensive watch, they argue. The people who buy Timex and those who buy Cartier are not the same...
