Mercedes May Cancel Hybrid SUV Plan, Because It Can't Get Nickel Metal Hydride Batteries. What Happened To Lithium?

Implications: Mercedes is leading the green charge in European luxury cars. It is bringing its Bluetec diesel engines to the market to improve fuel efficiency and lower emissions for its premium cars. Mercedes also keeps talking about a plug-in hybrid using a 'lithium' battery that is supposed to be coming soon. So, why is Mercedes thinking of canceling an SUV hybrid targeted for the US market because it won't be getting the nickel metal hydride vehicles it made a prepayment for from now moribund Cobasys?

Analysis: Mercedes, like every other profitable car maker, judges technology by results, not by PR for it.

Mercedes knows that in the US market a first step must not be a stumble.

Mercedes therefore designed a hybrid power train for its M - Class SUVs, made in Alabama, around the safe, reliable, long lived nickel metal hydride battery thus taking advantage of Toyota's phenomenal record of problem free hybrid operation by the now one million Priuses built since 1999 all using a nickel metal hydride battery in the hybrid power train and a traditional lead-acid starting-lighting-ignition battery for those purposes.

The problem seems to be that Mercedes either didn't want to use Toyota's hybrid power train or could not get a license to do so, so that it had to go to the market for  nickel metal hydride battery.

Clearly without thinking it through Mercedes decided to trust Cobasys to do the job of building it a nickel metal hydride battery. Mercedes clearly did not have competent or sophisticated battery production engineers to approve Cobasys as a supplier, or it would have discovered, even with a cursory inspection that Cobasys was not up to the job.

The strength and longevity of the nickel metal hydride based hybrid power train is proved by the fact that Mercedes having found out it had been tricked has decided to put off or cancel the M-Class hybrid rather than take a chance of failure with some unproven lithium technology.

The strength of Japan's and Toyota's lock on the nickel metal hydride battery manufacturing space is proven by the fact that even Mercedes could not find a supplier for nickel metal hydride batteries not connected to or beholden to Toyota 9or, perhaps, even Honda0.

This proves that the lithium fantasy has poisoned western battery research. instead of the success of Toyota causing research into the development of even better nickel metal hydride batteries by hopeful suppliers to western car makers the nickel metal hydride r&d has dried up outside of Japan thus leaving the market for the only safe, reliable, long lived technology in the sole control of Japanese car makers.

General Motors living more and more each day on past glory is mostly responsible for this ridiculous state of affairs. Mercedes was sucked in by GM's reliance on a failed supplier, Cobasys, and was blinded by the inconvenient truth that Cobasys and GM had no idea how to do their jobs.

I guess people will now continue to buy Lexus SUV hybrids utilizing nickel metal hydride batteries just as they should do. perhaps technology has simply surpassed the ability of Mercedes, as it has surpassed the ability of GM, to comprehend it.