Yeah, I know, who would’ve thought right? In actuality I barely have a clue as to who’s Daimler and none as to who’s Toray.
So let’s set things straight, the easy stuff first: Daimler is the company that owns Mercedes-Benz, the Germans responsible for bringing you the best cars, for your retirement fund.
So who’s Toray?
As it happens, Toray is a Japanese textile manufacturer. The only thing is, they don’t specialize in making weird tweed for the interior of your future Mercedes.
So if they don’t do cloth, the only thing really relevant in the textile business that meshes with the automotive industry is a little something called carbon fiber.
It’s carbon fiber where Toray apparently shine, and with their recently signed collaboration, their product will be used as materials for building the next generations of Mercedes vehicle.
Don’t think Mercedes has any plans to give Lotus a run for their money. The only thing they want to do is make their cars lighter. It seems that Mercedes considers their engineering to have gotten to a point where fuel economy can’t be achieved by any other manor than dropping weight.
So Mercedes gets lighter cars in the future, what do the Japanese get? Rather predictably, money, lots of it. Since the merger with Mercedes-Benz’ father, Toray’s stock values have gone up by 4.5 percent. Add to that the investment Mercedes will make to actually purchase 49% of the company and it all makes a lot of sense.
This means that everybody’s happy, and it also means that development of the situation is so far ahead that the first car to benefit from Toray carbon fiber will be the 2012 Mercedes SL
