Stuttgart 49°N/9°E --- “As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” This quote is from the famous French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – and Herbert Kohler, Vice President Group Research and Chief Environmental Officer at Daimler AG, would certainly agree with the second part of it. That’s because enabling the future is exactly what Kohler’s job entails. Still, he needs to predict and plan as well. After all, it takes around four years to develop a new vehicle model, which will then likely be built over the next seven to eight years and will be in use for another 10 to 15 years. “The people who decide today on the engineering features of a future vehicle generation need to have an idea of what the driving environment will look like in 15 or 20 years from now,” says Kohler.

Kohler is a thoroughly optimistic person who believes in the inexhaustible potential of human ingenuity. As such, he doesn’t worry much about the future: “There’s no danger of us running out of ideas,” he says with conviction. Mobility and the security of energy supplies are closely linked, and Kohler believes the two will develop in a consistent and evolutionary pattern toward lower emissions and the achievement of sustainability. “No one’s going to pull the plug and say that starting now, everything’s got to be completely different,” he says, adding that the best possible scenario would, of course, be a completely straight path to a bright future. However, the real world is different. The further you look ahead, the more often you see technically feasible forks in the road. “Naturally, all of us would prefer to focus on a single solution as soon as it becomes obvious,” says Kohler. “In practice, however, you need to keep your options open.”

Road to the future: Greater efficiency, hybrid drive, F-Cell

By way of example, it would be extremely helpful to know today just how powerful and efficient batteries will be in 20 years – or whether a competitive supply system for hydrogen fuel will be available at that time. Unfortunately, both are difficult to predict at the moment. “That’s why we focus on intelligent combinations of potential future modules,” says Kohler. It’s like a system of building blocks whose frame is composed of intelligently controlled hybrid technology. The word “hybrid” refers to a whole made up of different species (in the case of biology), or processes (in the case of technology). The special thing about hybrids is that while their constituent parts represent solutions in and of themselves, their combinations can display completely new and desirable characteristics.

The most common form of hybrid drive in the automotive sector is a combination of internal combustion engine and electric motor. The role that each of these hybrid elements will play in the future depends to a great extent on how fast high-performance batteries can be made available. In addition, the question as to whether internal combustion engines might eventually be replaced by fuel cells (and, if so, to what extent) in turn depends on the progress made with fuel cell technology and the creation of a comprehensive hydrogen infrastructure. Engineers know that the performance demands made upon Mercedes-Benz vehicles aren’t about to decline in the future. Nevertheless, time will tell how important each potential drive system module will be in the overall vehicle equation, and a look at the vehicle models that are now being launched on the “road to the future” illustrates just how varied the possible combinations are.