What’s in a name? Mercedes-Benz announces new EV naming conventions
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Those words, spoken by Juliet in Shakespeare’s great tragedy “Romeo and Juliet,” imply that names are meaningless. But don’t tell a product manager that, especially one in the automotive industry. Car names follow trends in culture and history. For example, the mid-century Atomic Age gave us powerful one-word American car nameplates that either hinted at space travel (Comet, Starfire, Galaxy, Mercury, Taurus) or glamor (Continental, Riviera, Monte Carlo, Eldorado, Monaco), while the Europeans remained more prosaic, using numbers that had more of an internal meaning than anything else (2002, 240D, 500, 401, 320iS).
However, once American automakers in the midst of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo had to shrink their automobiles en masse, a bevy of names—from Sedan de Ville to yes, even the Eldorado—began to look more like the names of Wi-Fi hotspots. Seemingly overnight, the sleek aerodynamic look of American cars was replaced by a supposedly more European boxy shape. Despite this, certain nameplates—examples include the Chevy Suburban (1935), the Honda Accord (1976), the Volkswagen Beetle (1938), and the Mercedes S-Class (1972)—have enjoyed great staying power.
This somewhat explains why Mercedes-Benz has announced a significant change to the nomenclature it uses for its electric vehicles, and if there’s anything Mercedes has been with nomenclature, it is consistently inconsistent.
The Stuttgart-based automaker will no longer use the “EQ” prefix for its EVs. The use of the prefix was in direct opposition to the nomenclature policy that Mercedes promulgated 10 years ago, when it began to use lowercase letters to indicate the type of a vehicle’s powerplant, such as “d” for diesel and “e” for electric.
The “EQ” prefix had become unwieldy in recent years, as it created confusion with internal combustion engine vehicles that used single-letter or two-letter prefixes followed by a class designation. For example, for the E-Class, or E-Klasse in German, there was both an EQE that was an E-Class EV sedan and an EQE SUV that was clearly not a sedan.
The fact that Mercedes‘s second quarter US sales report indicated that combined sales of the EQS sedan and EQS SUV were down by 52% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023 didn’t make the clumsy naming schema any more beloved.
Hence the news of yet another Mercedes nomenclature change.
Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius told weekly UK automobile magazine Autocar that “there will be two S-Classes in the future—ICE and electric.”
That solution neatly allows the Stuttgarters to eliminate the EQS name, which apparently didn’t enjoy the same status among luxury car buyers that the S-Class did.
The two new S-Class vehicles, however, will not be based on the same platform. The EV variant of the S-Class will use the forthcoming MB.EA Large platform, while the ICE variant of the S-Class will be based on a developed version of the existing MRA architecture.
It’s important to note that, while Mercedes-Benz had initially projected that EV sales would account for more than 20% of its 2,043,800 global sales in 2023, the electrics only achieved an 11% market share at best, despite a 73% overall increase in the automaker’s total EV sales from 2022.
Considering these sales figures, perhaps the Stuttgarters should have used the time and energy spent on reworking the nomenclature to strategize how to offer lower-priced EVs that can beat the competition from China.
The automaker had previously announced a significant change to its vehicle nomenclature in 2014 in an effort to simplify its model names. At that time, Mercedes standardized on a system that built model designations from combinations of between one and three uppercase letters. Different types of power were to be indicated by a lowercase letter. Mercedes also retired the BlueTec brand for diesels, reverting to using an unadorned letter “D” as had been used in the past, such as on the 240D, albeit in lowercase. Hybrid vehicles were to get an “h,” while electric vehicles were to receive an “e” designation.
Prior to that, the most significant change was in 1993, when the letters “C” and “E” became prefixes for the company’s compact and mid-sized sedans.
Source: Autocar