India To Become Hub For Daimler's Mobility Services Strategy

Here’s some more ‘electrifying’ talk. Daimler, the parent company of brands like Mercedes-Benz, on Wednesday revealed its plans to multiply the engineering workforce at its Bengaluru research facility to take the company’s mobile-first strategy forward.

After having tested its autonomous bus in Netherlands recently, the German manufacturer has already tested driverless trucks on European roads and is also working on driverless luxury cars. With the impetus on electric vehicles of late and changing consumer preferences, no wonder even Daimler is envisioning self-driven, mobility services as a part of the future of automobiles.

“There are two things to this as every other company will evolve more into a software company. There is no way to not be a software company. Secondly, the question to any company is where is profit. Right now profit is in selling products, in the future profit will be selling mobility,” said Daimler CIO Jan Brecht on his first visit to Mercedes-Benz Research & Development India (MBRDI) in Bengaluru.

“We will still make cars and trucks, but there might be different models in it. You will see the product prominently but you might not have to own the product. We will shift from selling a mechanical product to selling mobility services,” said Brecht.

Out of its 8,400-strong IT team, Daimler has around 1,300 dedicated software professionals. Another few hundred will be further hired to strengthen its mobile first strategy that could establish its position as a mobility services company.

The immediate step will be to obtain data from test vehicles. Though stored in Germany, some of the data will still be available on a cloud network that will enable its engineers to access it from other parts of the globe too, informed Brecht.