Ml350 All-wheel-drive Navigation Sunroof Multicontour Seats on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Weekly Recap: Mercedes, Volkswagen spend big as import automakers invest in North America

Import automakers are on a building frenzy in North America as resurgent car sales have prompted companies to expand their manufacturing footprints to meet rising demand. That was evidenced this week when Mercedes-Benz announced plans to build a $500-million factory to produce the Sprinter commercial van, and Volkswagen confirmed a whopping $1-billion investment to expand its massive plant in Mexico. Meanwhile Jaguar Land Rover reportedly wants to build a factory in North America, but not for at least three years, and Hyundai is said to be expanding in the southern United States. The common thread in all of this expansion? Trucks, time and money. Mercedes wants to capitalize on the burgeoning work van segment in the United States and will break ground in 2016 on a 200-acre site in Charleston, SC, to build the next-generation Sprinter. The site will have a paint shop, body shop and an assembly line, and 1,300 people will be employed when production ramps up. Why do this, when Mercedes has immense van operations in Germany? It's cheaper to build in the US for the US market. Building locally allows Mercedes to avoid import taxes, forego a complex shipping process that involves partially disassembling German-built Sprinters and naturally, reduces the time it takes to deliver finished trucks to their buyers. "This plant is key to our future growth in the very dynamic North American van market," Volker Mornhinweg, head of Mercedes-Benz Vans, said in a statement. He was speaking about Mercedes and vans, but another German automotive giant, Volkswagen, had similar motives for its mammoth expansion plans in Puebla, Mexico. The added space and production capacity will allow VW to build a three-row version of the Tiguan, and provide another crossover for its US lineup that's light on SUVs. The current Tiguan has two rows. The factory will be able to churn out 500 units daily of the larger variant, and they will be sold in North and South America. It will arrive in the US in mid-2017, a spokesman told Autoblog. VW also plans to build another crossover, a midsize seven-passenger vehicle, at its growing Chattanooga, TN, site. "Localization has become key to safeguarding our competitive position on the global market, and manufacturing the Tiguan in Mexico will bring production closer to the US market," Michael Horn, CEO of Volkswagen Group of America, said in a statement.

Daimler employees can set email to auto-delete during vacation

The Internet has shrunk the world in terms of the way people communicate by making it possible to send an email from Oslo and have it show up in Cleveland almost immediately. But that instant contact has wrecked the work/life balance for many. They get home from a long day at the office, yet they can never fully put their feet up and relax because another hour or more of checking and replying to emails awaits. However, German automotive giant Daimler is putting an end to that churn, at least while its employees are on vacation.
About 100,000 Daimler employees in Germany are eligible to opt-in to a new program called Mail on Holiday, according to The Atlantic. When the workers go on vacation, they can switch it on, and the service auto-deletes all of their incoming email. "Our employees should relax on holiday and not read work-related emails," said Wilfried Porth, board member for human resources, to The Financial Times as cited by The Atlantic.
Mail on Holiday puts a thumb on the scale of work/life balance in favor of a little more free time. The system means that Daimler employees shouldn't even be tempted to check their email on vacation because there's nothing there - and it also avoids them coming back from a relaxing holiday only to find a mailbox packed full of hundreds of unread messages. These days, people are absolutely obsessed with their work, often to the detriment of their health, not to mention spending time with their families and friends. On one hand, Mail on Holiday sounds like the sort of vacation breakthrough we'd need to truly unplug and unwind, but on the other hand, it makes our skin crawl just thinking about the lack of communication. What's your perspective? Have your say in Comments.

Poor headlights cause 40 cars to miss IIHS Top Safety Pick rating

Over the past few months, we've noticed a number of cars and SUVs that have come incredibly close to earning one of the IIHS's highest accolades, the Top Safety Pick rating. They have great crash test scores and solid automatic emergency braking and forward collision warning systems. What trips them up is headlights. That got us wondering, how many vehicles are there that are coming up short because they don't have headlights that meet the organization's criteria for an "Acceptable" or "Good" rating. This is a revision made after 2017, a year in which headlights weren't factored in for this specific award. This is also why why some vehicles, such as the Ford F-150, might have had the award last year, but have lost it for this year. We reached out to someone at IIHS to find out. He responded with the following car models. Depending on how you count, a whopping 40 models crash well enough to receive the rating, but don't get it because their headlights are either "Poor" or "Marginal." We say depending on how you count because the IIHS actual counts truck body styles differently, and the Infiniti Q70 is a special case. Apparently the version of the Q70 that has good headlights doesn't have adequate forward collision prevention technology. And the one that has good forward collision tech doesn't have good enough headlights. We've provided the entire list of vehicles below in alphabetical order. Interestingly, it seems the Volkswagen Group is having the most difficulty providing good headlights with its otherwise safe cars. It had the most models on the list at 9 split between Audi and Volkswagen. GM is next in line with 7 models. It is worth noting again that though these vehicles have subpar headlights and don't quite earn Top Safety Pick awards, that doesn't mean they're unsafe. They all score well enough in crash testing and forward collision prevention that they would get the coveted award if the lights were better.