Mr Källenius, we want to talk about sustainability. Under your leadership, Mercedes is increasingly focusing on luxury cars. How sustainable is it that you offer more and more large heavy cars and fewer and fewer smaller ones?

Marcus Theurer

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Mercedes-Benz has always stood for something special. At the same time, modern luxury must be sustainable. Both go well together. The durable, the high-quality, the technically innovative is sustainable. The technology for ecological sustainability that we develop for our luxury models will also be used in other cars at some point in the future. And don't forget: our cars last longer. This is also a contribution to sustainability.

How sustainable is it to offer huge 2.5-ton cars in which a single passenger and perhaps his driver sit?

There will always be products for the entire spectrum. Just as there are single-family houses and terraced houses and apartments.

And you are responsible for the family home?

We will continue to offer cars in the entry-level segment. Although our offer in this area will be smaller, no reduction in sales is planned. We want to grow above all at the upper end in the segments in which we are represented and which promise greater profitability. This gives us the necessary financial strength to put technical innovations on the road. And we need them for climate protection in transport.

Politicians want to trim the combustion engine for sustainability: They may still sell combustion cars in the EU after 2035 if they run on green e-fuels. Good news for Mercedes?

I think openness to technology is good. But Mercedes has a strategy that clearly relies on electric drive. We will not fundamentally change these because of the decisions on e-fuels. From 2025, we will align all our new vehicle architectures solely for electric drives. Four years ago, we said that our new car fleet should become CO2039-neutral across the entire value chain by 2. That is our goal.

E-fuels play no role in this?

For existing vehicles, yes. If someone has a Mercedes with a combustion engine, then he will also be able to drive it with e-fuels. Until the beginning of the next decade, we will still be offering both drive types, electric and combustion engines, in parallel. But in the longer term, we do not see the future in e-fuels, but in electric drives, and that's what we're concentrating on.

Why is the electric car better?

Its efficiency is simply sensationally good. Of the electricity you generate with a wind turbine, for example, around 70 percent of the energy in an electric car is used as driving force on the road, while in the combustion engine it is significantly less. In addition, e-cars emit no emissions, while this does not apply to cars powered by e-fuels. This is relevant, because it may well be that in the future large cities such as London or Paris will prescribe local zero emissions. And thirdly, the electric car is still a young technology compared to the combustion engine. We still see great potential for progress: the electric drive will overtake the combustion engine in terms of performance before the end of this decade.