STUTTGART: Time has caught up with the Mercedes-Benz A-Class which was dropped in North America last year and is slated to be retired from the European market next year or in 2025.
It was back in 1997 that a moose in Sweden caused the original A-Class to swerve violently and roll over during tests designed to simulate a driver avoiding such errant elks.
The road test in Sweden on Oct 21, 1997 was a black day for the brand and the repercussions plunged the German carmaker into a PR crisis.
The current A-Class is a compact saloon that bears no resemblance to its boxy, upright baby Benz of yore. It is the most affordable Mercedes, but saloons have generally fallen out of favour with buyers who prefer SUVs or crossovers.
The car is also a victim of a new strategy at the three-pointed star. Back in the 90s, the model was pitched as the entry into the compact segment and generated volume sales.
Today, company boss Ola Källenius is pursuing a luxury strategy. The entry-level segment is to be thinned out from seven to four body variants and the focus will be on increasing profit margins and not mass-production.
The German car maker is not abandoning the compact car segment altogether, though.
In the future, it will to focus on successors to the CLA saloon (and CLA Shooting Brake), Mercedes-Benz GLA and Mercedes-Benz GLB, according to a report in Handelsblatt business paper.
With the axe hovering over the A-Class, car expert Stefan Reindl vividly recalls the moose test: "That was a blow that no one had expected at the time". The damage to the company's image was "enormous". "Mercedes has been shaken in its fundamental values," said industry expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer. "It was an earthquake."
At the time, Mercedes stood for safety and quality. With the moose test, that safety confidence was shattered overnight. But the automotive giant reacted well to the incident. "I thought that was excellent because Mercedes explained exactly what the problem was and what the countermeasure was," said Reindl. Mercedes went on to regain trust with new technology.
The company stopped deliveries of the A-Class and retrofitted the vehicles already delivered with the Electronic Stability Program (ESP).
The ESP system, developed by the supplier Bosch together with Daimler-Benz - as the group was still called at the time - was intended to prevent skidding and had until then been reserved in series production only for the wealthy customers of the range-topping S-Class limousine.
Daimler spent a lot of money and equipped the A-Class with ESP as standard in order to regain trust. It was the breakthrough for ESP, and Bosch has since delivered well over 300 million ESP systems.
So the A-Class overcame its problems and went on to become a steady seller which "made a major contribution to changing and rejuvenating the brand image of Mercedes-Benz," as a company spokesman put it.
The car remained the odd one out however, and as forerunner of the minivans too come, the A-Class was "simply not dynamic, but rather conservative." It appealed more to an older clientele, although the target group was supposed to be much younger.
"If you passed an A-Class back then, it often had people over 60 sitting in it," said Reindl. The real success with a younger clientele came with the later model series.
The luxury strategy that Mercedes-Benz is pursuing today is viewed critically by car expert Dudenhöffer. "This is a new moose test," he said. The risks are great. The car business of the future is strongly driven by economies of scale. In the case of software, it is worthwhile to develop it for a large number of cars, as the costs allocated to the individual cars are lower that way. The secret of the cars' success is technology and software, Dudenhöffer believes.
Mercedes-Benz has promised to "significantly upgrade" its product range and ironically it is not a loose moose but Swedish-born company boss Källenius, who is sounding the death knell for the A-Class.
