Newswise — Car buyers everywhere are spurning gas guzzlers, and some carmakers feel the pain more than others. Take Mercedes-Benz, long known for its luxury cars--its flagship S-Class is a full-size sedan that starts at around US $90 000. Without sacrificing performance or comfort, the company must meet the expectations of its increasingly environmentally conscious customers.
Mercedes, a division of Daimler, has ingeniously applied technology to come up with a stunning solution. It's the F700 research car, which debuted last year. The F700 was created to give customers a preview of what they might expect from an S-Class sedan 10 years from now. The interior is hugely spacious, modern, and filled with electronics; the exterior is shiny and sleek, a dramatic evolution from Mercedes's current upright look. The car is also fast: it goes from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in 7.5 seconds.
And here's the best part: the massive F700 sips no more fuel than a Toyota Prius. The critical advance is the power plant. The F700 is a gasoline-electric hybrid, but it wrings most of its efficiencies out of good old-fashioned internal combusion. Mercedes is betting that such engines will be a mainstay of the industry for a very long time to come. But in the face of climate change and soaring global demand for oil, the company has decided to show how much room for improvement there was in the 130-year-old internal combustion engine.
What makes this feat possible is a futuristic engine technology known as HCCI, or homogeneous charge-compression ignition. HCCI combines the low emissions of gasoline engines and the fuel efficiency of diesel engines. Automakers have long been working to develop HCCI engines and the electronic controllers needed to tame their combustion. GM and Volkswagen, among others, have running prototypes. But Mercedes's small power plant--a 1.8-liter four-cylinder twin-turbo HCCI engine that burns regular gasoline--shocked the experts.
In "The Soul of a New Mercedes," IEEE Spectrum offers an in-depth look at how the German carmaker engineered this superluxurious and yet remarkably fuel-efficient concept car.
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