Tag Archives: Mercedes-Benz

News

Mercedes-Benz Wants Your Old Car – And They’ll Build a New One Out of It

Mercedes-Benz is up to something unusual. No, not another luxury SUV with more chrome than good taste, but something far more ambitious: turning yesterday’s rust buckets into tomorrow’s luxury cruisers.

In partnership with German recycling heavyweight TSR Group, Stuttgart’s finest are taking “urban mining” seriously. Forget Indiana Jones and glittering treasure chests — the real goldmine, apparently, is your clapped-out diesel Corsa. Starting summer 2025, Mercedes and TSR will begin dismantling end-of-life cars in northwest Germany, regardless of brand. Pollutants? Gone. Usable parts? Plucked out. The rest? Sliced, diced, and transformed into shiny, high-grade materials like steel, aluminium, plastic, copper, and glass. And then — here’s the clever bit — all that stuff gets funnelled back into the production cycle for brand-new Mercs.

This isn’t just about ticking green boxes. Markus Schäfer, Mercedes’ tech boss, says the vision is to slash dependence on primary raw materials, cut CO₂, and keep valuable resources spinning in a closed loop. In plain English: fewer holes dug in the ground, fewer ships lugging ore across oceans, and more S-Classes built out of yesterday’s scrap.

Mercedes calls it a pilot project, but the implications are huge. Done right, this could be the blueprint for a circular automotive economy — where the ghost of your old E-Class might literally live on inside a new EQS. Better yet, the project avoids “downcycling” (that’s recycling where quality suffers, leaving you with weaker materials). Instead, the goal is proper high-quality stuff that’s good enough to meet the brand’s famously picky standards.

And it all ties into Mercedes’ Ambition 2039 masterplan: a net carbon-neutral fleet across its entire life cycle. To get there, they’re gunning for 40% of every car to be made from recycled materials within the next decade. Yes, your future AMG GT could be partly built from the carcass of a long-forgotten Opel Vectra.

For now, this pilot is focused on northwest Germany, but the potential is global. After all, every city has scrapyards full of end-of-life vehicles — urban treasure chests waiting to be cracked open. And with supply chains wobbling and raw materials getting pricier, being able to turn junk into luxury sounds like the kind of clever thinking the industry desperately needs.

So, next time your old hatchback coughs its last, don’t cry. It might just reincarnate as a shiny new Mercedes grille. Circle of life, Stuttgart style.

Source: Mercedes-Benz

Tuning

Brabus Rocket GTC: A Convertible That Wants to Warp Time

Monterey Car Week isn’t short on spectacle. You can’t swing a silk scarf without hitting a seven-figure hypercar that looks like it’s just landed from Mars. But this year, Brabus decided that wasn’t quite enough noise and rolled up with something called the Rocket GTC—a name that sounds less like a car and more like a Cold War missile silo.

The donor car is no slouch: Mercedes’ SL63 S E Performance, a plug-in hybrid grand tourer already packing 816 horsepower. But Brabus, never content with “quite powerful enough,” got the spanners out, bored out the V8 from 4.0 to 4.5 litres, wound the turbos up to “are you absolutely sure?” and came back with a 1,000 horsepower convertible. That’s right. Four figures. In a drop-top. Because sanity is for accountants.

Torque? An interstellar 1,820 Nm, although the engineers politely limited it to 1,620 Nm. Apparently, that was the point where the gearbox and driveshafts started filing complaints with HR. Still, even with the leash on, it’ll hurl itself from 0–100 km/h in 2.6 seconds. A Ferrari 296 would barely have finished checking its mirrors.

Of course, Brabus didn’t just crank the power and call it a day. The SL’s bodywork has been on a steady diet of carbon fibre and steroids: swollen arches, fresh bumpers, a ducktail spoiler, and so many air intakes you could confuse it for a jet engine. The wheels? Bespoke 21-inch up front, 22-inch at the rear, with aerodynamic blades and proper center-lock studs—because what’s a hyper-GT without race car cosplay?

And when you’re done terrorising time and space, you can sink into an interior that’s been drowned in red leather. Seats, dashboard, door panels, even the floor mats. It’s less “grand tourer” and more “Dracula’s lounge.” Brabus also fitted a new stainless steel exhaust, which, judging by the company’s track record, is less about emissions and more about ensuring the neighbours know you’ve just started the car from three postal codes away.

So, what is the Rocket GTC? It’s not a supercar, not really a grand tourer, and certainly not a convertible in the usual sense. It’s a 1,000 horsepower, leather-lined, carbon-clad act of lunacy—the sort of car you build because nobody told you to stop.

And we love them for it.

Source: Brabus

News

BMW Heart, Mercedes Soul?

In a move that sounds less like German engineering and more like a soap opera plot twist, we might soon be staring down the barrel of BMW engines inside Mercedes-Benz cars. Yes, you read that correctly: the Bavarian roundel under the bonnet of the three-pointed star. Somewhere in Stuttgart, an engineer just choked on his pretzel.

According to a whisper from Manager Magazin, Mercedes is in talks with BMW to buy its four-cylinder engines from 2027 onward. The candidate? None other than BMW’s workhorse, the B48 — a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-pot that’s already busy powering half the BMW lineup, from Minis to the X5. Built in Steyr, Austria, the B48 is as versatile as a Swiss army knife: it’ll fit sideways, lengthways, and probably even upside down if you asked nicely. For Mercedes, that flexibility means it can slot the engine into everything from compact runabouts to mid-size plug-in hybrids.

Now, some of you might be wondering: doesn’t Mercedes already have a four-cylinder engine? Indeed, it does. The shiny new M252, currently humming away in the CLA, paired with a mild-hybrid system. But here’s the snag — it’s about as good at playing nice with plug-in hybrid tech as cats are with bath time. Worse still, it’s built in China, which makes it a tariff nightmare for US-bound models. Cue the BMW B48 swooping in like a knight in Bavarian armor, potentially backed by a shared US engine plant to dodge Uncle Sam’s import taxes.

And this is where things get deliciously ironic. Remember when Mercedes promised in 2021 that it would be all electric by 2030? Fast forward a few years, and that dream has gone the way of your old iPod. With EV demand cooling faster than a Weissbier in the Alps, Mercedes has admitted that internal combustion will live “well into the 2030s.” Translation: the petrol engine is going nowhere, and Stuttgart needs a partner to keep the flames alive.

Of course, BMW is no stranger to lending out its engines. Morgan, Ineos, Range Rover — all happily running on Bavarian lungs. Even Toyota’s Supra isn’t shy about admitting it’s basically a Z4 in cosplay. But Mercedes? This would be unprecedented. Two German luxury titans sharing the same beating heart? It’s like discovering that Coke bottles its soda at the Pepsi plant.

If this deal goes through, expect purists on both sides to clutch their AMG and M Division rosaries. Will a BMW-powered Mercedes still feel like a Mercedes? Or will it have just enough Bavarian DNA to develop an annoying habit of tail-happiness on roundabouts?

One thing’s for sure: in 2027, the Autobahn is going to get a lot more complicated.

Source: Manager Magazin via Autocar