Mercedes 2006 Annual Report Download - page 120

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Research and Development
€5.3 billion invested in research and development | Reorganization improves cooperation,
efficiency, quality and speed of development | Enhanced vehicle safety leads to fewer traffic
accidents | Presentation of the world’s first gasoline engine with piezo injectors and
jet-guided fuel injection | Clear concepts for achieving the goal of zero-emission drive systems
104
Research and development are key factors for market
success. A pioneering spirit and technological progress are two
of the essential pillars supporting the global success of our
products. The goals of DaimlerChrysler’s worldwide research and
development departments are to ensure that our customers
enjoy individual mobility on a sustainable basis and to put
customer-focused innovations on the road, while conserving
resources and helping to protect the environment.
25,200 people were working towards achieving exactly these goals
at Corporate Research and in the development departments
of the Mercedes Car Group, the Chrysler Group, the Truck Group
and the Vans and Buses units at the end of 2006. Daimler-
Chrysler invested €5.3 billion in research and development in
2006 (2005: €5.6 billion) (see page 55).
Reorganization of research and development activities
improves efficiency and quality. Competition among all vehicle
manufacturers has become muchmore intense in the past few
years. Correspondingly, the pressure to innovate has increased
substantially, particularly in the premium segment. To ensure
that we can react more rapidly to changed market conditions, on
the one hand we have strengthened the organizational links
between our research and development departments, on the other
hand we have combined our resources and focused them more
closely on the customer-oriented development of our products.
The newdepartment Group Research and Mercedes Car Group
Development is therefore now responsible not only for Mercedes
Car Group products but also – in its role as a competence center
for the entire Group – for preliminary development activities at all
vehicle divisions. This will allow us to safeguard our innovation
expertise and transfer it more rapidly into marketable products,
thereby ensuring even greater market success.
Closer cooperation is leading to the standardization and opti-
mization of Group-wide processes, as well as bringing products
to a more advanced level at an earlier stage. For example, our
researchers are working with IT-based simulation tools that allow
new components and systems to be tested even before the first
prototypes have been built. This simulation tool, which was devel-
oped by Corporate Research, enables our development engineers
to extensively test the functions of a new component that exists
only in the form of a data set, often more intensively than when
using a test vehicle. In this way, weaknesses can be identified
and eliminated at an early stage, thereby ensuring that a high level
of quality is achieved when series production is started.
The vision of accident-free driving – enhanced safety. Safety
has been the top priority at DaimlerChrysler for a very long time.
This is why our efforts to enhance both active and passive safety
are based not only on legal requirements, but also on the actual
events that take place during an accident.
One example is the Brake Assist System (BAS), which was pre-
sented for the firsttime in 1996 and has been standard equipment
in all new Mercedes-Benz passenger cars since 1997. BAS signifi-
cantly reduces vehicle braking distance in critical situations.
Some ten years after the launch of BAS, the official German acci-
dent statistics for 2006 clearly show that Brake Assist helps
prevent accidents. Rear-end collisions caused by Mercedes-Benz
passenger cars have been reduced by a further 8% due to BAS.
Moreover, the number of severe accidents involving pedestrians
fell by 13%.
BAS therefore makes road traffic safer, as does the Electronic
Stability Program (ESP), which was introduced by Mercedes-Benz
in 1995 and has been standard equipment in all Mercedes-Benz
passenger carssince 1999. Accident statistics from Europe, Japan
and the United States show that ESP has caused the proportion
of accidents due to driver error to fall from 21% to 12%; in other
words, it has decreased by nearly a half.
The PRE-SAFE®braking system introduced in the CL and S-Class
in 2006 takes us another step closer to the vision of accident-free
driving. If an accident is imminent and the driver has failed to
react to visual and acoustic warnings, the new system automatically
initiates a partial braking maneuver, in which it generates up
to 40% of maximum braking force. If the driver then depresses the
brake pedal, the system immediately makes the maximum braking
force available. Depending on the situation, these actions will either
prevent an accident from occurring at the last second or reduce
the severity of impact by up to 40%. We also offer a similar system
for commercial vehicles. Known as Active Brake Assist, it is
currently in use in the Actros heavy-duty truck. If a collision is