In our Reality Check this week, Mercedes-Benz makes news by re-designing the way it names its cars.

With many new models and staggering choices in power-train types like hybrids, diesels, electrics, fuel cells, Mercedes-Benz is changing the way they name their cars.

Like other brands re-orchestrating their naming, Mercedes-Benz will be trying to re-align their nomenclature to make it more navigable for customers around the world.


Retained will be letters for their current model lines, A, B, C, E, S, GL and so forth with a number denoting the power level to its right. Most notable is the change in the lettered suffix behind that number.

We will now see things like e for electric, h for hybrid, f for fuel cell, and d for diesel. So an E series diesel will now be E250d instead of E250 BlueTec. Seems actually like going backwards in time a bit.

This move will reduce the deck-lid wording by replacing the words like Hybrid and BlueTec with that small letter. 4Matic however remains unabbreviated.

Also unabbreviated will be the addition of Maybach back into the realm with top zoot models like the coming Mercedes-Maybach S-Class.

This all makes more sense than Infiniti and Cadillac’s re-naming schemes but the fact that the numerology on these new deck-lids still has no true relation to the actual engine size is still vexing.