According to the President of DaimlerChrysler Co. in Thailand, Wolfgang Huppenbauer, there are around 100 units of the Mercedes-Benz C-Class Avantgarde that will be imported to be tested on the market before local assembly.

The German automaker will only consider adding imports of the model later if the demand for the new C-Class exceeds the initial import supply, as told by Huppenbauer. The price for the Mercedes-Benz C-Class Avantgarde is at 3.99 million baht.

During the first quarter of 2008, Mercedes-Benz plans on assembling its C-Class Avantgarde locally and its target number of units to be sold for next year is 1,000 units.

Huppenbauer also said, “The retail price for the locally-assembled model cannot be disclosed until it has been endorsed by the authorities.”

Because the C-Class features better safety and an improved fuel economy, the company has high hopes that the model will be warmly welcomed.

Huppenbauer said, “Through innovative high-performance technologies, we aim to raise the bar even higher when it comes to safety, comfort and agility in the segment of compact premium automobiles.”

The C-Class is able to reduce the fuel consumption by 6 percent. Moreover, there is an 18 percent increase in torque and this translates to the practical effect of lessening the speeds of the engine, and thus fuel consumption is also lessened.

The fuel consumption benefited from the efforts of the company to maintain a low vehicle weight even though the model has large exterior dimensions and extra severe crash standards. Because the weight of the model was kept low, the new C-Class still has the same weight as its previous generation.

Another fact of the matter, the C-Class is now actually Mercedes-Benz best selling model series as it has sold over six million units worldwide.

Huppenbauer said that the falling luxury vehicle market locally was not to beyond expectation this year because of the economic and political outlook that seem to be uncertain.

During the first nine months of this year, the overall vehicle market deteriorated by 20 percent as opposed to the same period last year. In the same period, the sales of Mercedes-Benz declined by 10 percent to 2,500 units.

Based on the results in the first three quarters, the company forecast sales of 3,500 vehicles for the full year.

Huppenbauer said, “We cannot do it if the situation remains unchanged.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Mercedes Benz C-Class. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.