The chief designer of Mercedes-Benz says that the current strong aesthetic similarities between the C-Class, E-Class and S-Class will be carried forward into the next-generation of vehicles despite some calls that the three model lines look too similar to the untrained eye.
“We will always make sure these three limos speak one language,” said the brand’s design boss Gordon Wagner.
“The brand identity is more important than the product identity, still they are different with subtle things – DRLs and so on – and of course even from proportions the S-Class has much more gravity and so on. Still, many differentiations but also many similarities, so its still the Mercedes pick in each segment.”
According to Wagner, the idea isn’t for the C-Class, E-Class and S-Class to compete with each other, the idea is that each of those cars presents the Mercedes-Benz pick in that segment, so that a buyer with a certain budget would pick the car that suits them, so long as its a Mercedes.
“So the enemy is the competition, it’s not us, if they buy a car from us it doesn’t matter [which one]. They must not buy competitor cars so we want to make sure the luxury pick in every segment is a Mercedes, so they speak the same language first of all.”
The previous-generations of each of those three vehicles varied considerably more than the current models, a fact that Wagner says he has helped correct which has led to far better sales.
“We are coming from complete diversity before, every car was looking completely different and sometimes not appealing, so first task was to bring it into family resemblance. Our success shows that we were right, we were not even the premium company maybe ten years ago, now we are the leading luxury company [thanks to the new designs],” Wagner said.
The next-generation S-Class will soon kick off yet another evolution of the brand’s design language, but it’s unlikely that it will be a revolutionary change from what we are seeing today.
“The update with the new S-Class that is coming out soon, we will update the whole line up and again its one complete generation so we will facelift the E-Class and bring in a new C-Class as well so we will see the steps of generation as well,” Wagner added.
