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IPFS News Link • Transportation

Mercedes-Benz Starts Luxury Pickups for Adventurers, Rich Dads

• http://www.bloomberg.com, Elisabeth Behrmann

In late 2017, the luxury-car maker will start selling mid-size pickups, smaller than Ford Motor Co.'s F-150 that's popular in the U.S., with seats for five people. Mercedes presented two near-production stylings of the X-Class in Stockholm this week, one with a brash metallic-green paint job featuring an electric winch at the front and the other a less rugged version designed for city driving.

"With the Mercedes-Benz pickup, we will close one of the last gaps in our portfolio," Daimler Chief Executive Officer Dieter Zetsche said on Tuesday in a statement.

Expanding into pickups shows how far Mercedes parent Daimler AG is prepared to go in pursuit of sales volumes as competition among luxury-car makers intensifies, even though attempts by rivals including General Motors Co. to win customers with upscale models haven't always been successful. It's also the latest bid by the world's biggest maker of commercial vehicles to repurpose models for a broader audience, after it revamped its Vito small goods transporter into the V-Class family car.


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