Thursday, 28th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search

Mercedes Benz records 193,000 sales in January

By Benjamin Alade
16 February 2018   |   3:12 am
Daimler AG, a German multinational automotive corporation has reported January sales of over 190,000 units in the Mercedes-Benz Passenger cars segment, making it the most successful start to a year in the company’s history. With this new sales record, which also represents a growth of 8.4 per cent, Mercedes-Benz started 2018 as successfully as it…

PHOTO:AFP

Daimler AG, a German multinational automotive corporation has reported January sales of over 190,000 units in the Mercedes-Benz Passenger cars segment, making it the most successful start to a year in the company’s history.

With this new sales record, which also represents a growth of 8.4 per cent, Mercedes-Benz started 2018 as successfully as it concluded year 2017, and has defended its position as the bestselling premium brand with the most new registrations.

According to Daimler, demand for the Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) from Mercedes-Benz was as high as ever at the beginning of the year. With an increase of 9.9 per cent, a new record was set of 71,409 units sold. The GLC, GLC Coupé and G-Class all set new records for unit sales.

The new G-Class had its world premiere at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January. Mercedes-Benz has so far delivered a total of five million SUVs to its customers, including two million of the GLE and its predecessor, the M-Class.

The new S-Class Saloon achieved a 25.3 per cent sales increase to 8,130 units in January. The S-Class Saloon was particularly popular in its biggest markets, China and the USA, achieving significant sales growth in both markets. The new S-Class Coupe and Cabriolet models were launched in Europe in January.

Last month, Mercedes-Benz delivered 33,063 of the E-Class Saloon and Estate models to its customers. This represents a 10.4 per cent increase in unit sales and is a new record for a January. Mercedes-Benz has already sold more than 500,000 units of the new generation of the E-Class Saloon and Estate since April 2016.

Reacting to the news, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Weststar Associates Limited, Authorised General Distributor of Mercedes-Benz in Nigeria, Mirko Plath, said Mercedes-Benz has indeed defended its position as the bestselling premium brand, and with these new deliveries, Mercedes-Benz made its best start to a year of all time, thus continuing seamlessly from its seventh consecutive record-setting year in 2017.

He said: “We are proud to represent the Mercedes-Benz brand in Nigeria and have planned for the year 2018, some exciting products as already being announced within past few weeks.”

Coming also from global sales and service unit; Mercedes-Benz reached a new level of interaction with its customers at the end of last year with its intelligent, virtual assistant, “Ask Mercedes”. This free app serves to answer questions on the car’s displays, functions and operation. It uses artificial intelligence and combines a chatbot with augmented-reality functions. Questions can be typed into a smartphone display or asked using speech recognition.

In the new E-, S- and the new A-Class, operating controls and displays can be scanned with a smartphone camera. Following the visual recognition of object, an explanation of the relevant function is given in multimedia form via video, text, pictures or link. Ask Mercedes was first launched as a pilot version in English in South Africa, India and Malaysia.

A version limited to the augmented-reality functions has already gone online in the USA. Launch is planned for early this year in India, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia. A version in German will follow in 2018. The app is already in use in the E- and S-Class, it will be available in the new A-Class and other models.

The app for the Mercedes me Adapter is also very popular. Mercedes-Benz is the first automobile manufacturer to offer customers the possibility to retrofit connectivity features in their cars using this adapter.

The Mercedes me Adapter is already available in 22 countries for 24 Mercedes-Benz model series (in some cases going back to 2002), and has already been installed in more than 100,000 vehicles. Since the end of last year, the related app has offered customers new functions such as “Find a parking space” and “Car health monitor,” which displays warning messages from the car in the app.

In this article

0 Comments