1976 450 Slc Four Passenger Sport Coupe on 2040-cars

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Zetsche's CEO tenure extended through 2016 at Daimler

There appear to be two takes on Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche having his contract extended for three more years, to 2016. A report in The Detroit News quotes the chairman of Daimler's supervisory board, Manfred Bischoff, talking up the stability at the top, "With today's extensions of the contracts of Dieter Zetsche and Thomas Weber, we are maintaining the important continuity at the top executive level." Bischoff also stated that that Zetsche has a plan to "further enhance Daimler's overall performance."
Over at Reuters, though, the three-year extension was seen as a lack of complete confidence in Zetsche's plans, since his contract was supposedly meant to be extended by five years. A spokesman said the board decided to extend executive contracts by only three years if the person was 60 or would turn 60 during the contract, but that was news to observers. Zetsche wants to make Mercedes-Benz the top selling luxury manufacturer globally by 2020, but has fallen to third place behind Audi and BMW. It hasn't held the top spot 2005, and investors judged it valued at half that of BMW at the end of 2012 once Daimler's truck business was subtracted.
Analysts cites the fact that Daimler stock hasn't bested its rivals but twice in twelve years, and that the company revised its profit target downward last year by nearly one billion euros, warning of stagnant earnings this year and will miss its original margin target for 2013.

Mercedes-Petronas AMG W04 launched to little fanfare, lots of pressure [w/video]

No indoor cocktail hour for the launch of the W04, the newest chassis built by the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One team. Instead, Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton spent a morning in photo and video sessions at the track in Jerez, Spain then paused a moment to introduce the car. The team will want the W04 to demonstrate the World Championship credentials of the team personnel and one of the team drivers, instead of the mostly humble performances we've seen over the past three years.
The W04 has been fitted with a new five-element front wing, pushrod front and pull-rod rear suspension, a second-generation Coanda exhaust and an "aggressively packaged" rear end. A small vanity panel, à la Infiniti Red Bull's RB9, covers the stepped nose.
Team principal Ross Brawn has called it "a clear step forward in design and detail sophistication," but as much as we truly respect Brawn's abilities and achievements, we heard him say similar things about the updated W03 last year before almost every race weekend from about mid-season. We really hope he's right this time, and so does the team's newest driver, Lewis Hamilton. We'll do our best to ignore the parallels of the Mercedes F1 team having signed a sponsorship deal with Blackberry, another company trying to find its way back to the top and still struggling, and just point you to the video below of the W04 in action.

Gullwing America turns SLS AMG Roadster into stunning 1955 300 SC redux

Gullwing America specializes in what it calls "retro styling meets modern technology." It's next demonstration of that is the convertible above, a stylized recreation of the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SC (inset) supported by the structure of a 2012 SLS AMG Roadster. Commissioned by a client in Eastern Europe, the resulting car is called the 300 SLC.
The hand-formed aluminum bodywork required just a few changes to the SLS AMG Roadster, namely reworking the headlights into a stacked arrangement of LEDs and relocating the pop-up spoiler behind the cabin. The retro grille and long, straight hood evoke the past, the custom exhaust, height-adjustable suspension, 21-inch wheels up front and 22-inch wheels in back, however, stray a little further from history. The 300 SLC will come with a hardtop and be one-of-a-kind, making it even rarer than its inspiration, of which 92 were made.
If you have any more questions, they can probably be answered in the high-res photo gallery above and press release below.