Daimler CEO Zetsche wants to make this a ‘Mercedes decade'

Yes, and DaimlerChrysler was going to be a "100 year company" created by a "merger of equals". I think Jeurgen Schrempp is tending bar at his girlfriend's Alpine ski lodge now.

This is the gang that couldn't shoot straight. They blew their chance to become a mass-marketer by failing to invest in anything but trucks and SUVs @ Chrysler. Now they've only got sky-high German labor costs and their protected German market. Once the rest of the world realizes the emperor has no clothes, they'll become a botique-brand like Jaguar. Perhaps a Chinese or Indian company will purchase the brand and move production outside of Germany.

Their attempts to move up and down market (Maybach & Smart) have been failures they refuse to admit. Their own attempt to cut costs gave us the most unreliable MB's ever, pretty much everything from 1995-2010.

Dieter Zetsche belongs on the scrapheap of auto history. His turn-around of Freightliner was all based on cheap leases that bit the company in the ass 5-years later when the market was flooded with cheap off-lease trucks. Of course by then, he was busy mis-managing Chrysler.

Good-riddance to this company.

"Their own attempt to cut costs gave us the most unreliable MB's ever, pretty much everything from 1995-2010."


Eh, 1995 to around 2004/2005 was the era of not so reliable Mercedes'. Post 2005 models have drastically improved.

I had thought about cutting the "unreliable" years of MB off at 2005, but having heard some recent horror stories, I decided to include 2010. Not data to back this extended date, but I think my point is made.

BTW, care to guess what DaimlerChrysler's most expensive single warranty item was during the Daimler and Chrysler era? V6 engine failures in the ML-series SUVs.

So you hear a bunch of exaggerated horror stories from "some people". Wow.

Every brand has horror stories and those are the exception rather than the rule.

With/Without the anecdotal stories, I'll bet Daimler thought the 90s would be the "Decade of Mercedes" and instead it became the decade of Mercedes flops (some literal, like the early A-class).

BTW, love the bar-code license plate on the MB F125 Concept. Which do you think will be more likely to occur in the "future"; computers will use Optical Character Recognition to read license plates, OR human eyes will evolve to read/report bar codes when somebody does a hit & run? LOL

Sick of these exaggerated headlines/comments. No, duh! What else would the CEO from Daimler want make this decade be? The decade of..."meh, we're just gonna cruise and make a small loss each year"? This headline could be replaced by any CEO of any (car) company. Let's just mention they are bringing the CLC shooting brake or whatever product announcement is in the article!