G. David Felt - Staff Writer Alternative Energy - www.cheersandgears.com

Daimler Scales back Hydrogen, Focuses on EV!

According to the story from Autoblog, Daimler has chosen to scale back R&D into Hydrogen auto's and focus on EV auto's. This will not stop them from rolling out a Hydrogen GLC in select markets around the world where Hydrogen fueling facilities are available according to Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche. According to Daimler, pushing out 10 EV models by 2022 will help with reducing the emission pressure on their ICE product line allowing them to minimize the pressure and costs of transitioning from an ICE product producer to one of alternative energy, be it EV or Hydrogen, only the future will tell.

Yet, this is telling in more ways than one might expect. Yes GM and Honda have teamed up to bring in their next generation of Hydrogen auto to a global market, but you have Daimler, Toyota, VW, Ford and even Hyundai which sells their Tucson Fuel Cell move R&D dollars to the EV world as seen by the Ioniq Trio. Does this indicate vindication for Nissan Leaf and Tesla S / X?

Daimler has decided to change the Smart label to a pure EV label. So just how far will the MB product road map change after 2022? Could by 2025-2030 ICE truly reduce to 50% or less of worldwide sales versus EV?

Interesting is that Green car is stating that Daimler is pretty much woken up to the fact that Hydrogen will not happen due to excessive costs of the infrastructure and production of Hydrogen. Plus the fact that you can go double the range on diesel and with battery tech farther on battery than you can with Fuel cell.

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1104842_early-mercedes-fuel-cell-drivers-sobering-assessment-to-industry

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1109713_did-mercedes-turn-its-back-on-hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles

Clearly Daimler sees EV's as the full future right now.