YouSaid · the spoken record

Ola Källenius

lines on the record: 81
first: 2022-06-21
most recent: 2022-06-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What I think Mercedes customers expect is that they have access to a holistic Mercedes-Benz universe. And it's not just about the physical product, it's also about the digital interface. You have your Mercedes ID, your Mercedes-Me ID with that ID from the sofa in your living room. You can turn on the aircon or the heating in the winter so you get into a warm car. You even have things like Urban Guard where you use the sensors of the car to check if your car is safe. You could maybe even check in the future if your driveway is safe. So there are so many aspects, so many domains, also to autonomous drive and so on and so forth. So I don't think that you can rip out one piece of it and just say, you know, here's an island sitting on its own and the mainland of the car and all the other islands around the car are not integrated into that. So we are very much looking at providing a”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there the analogy with the smartphones work again. Then it's not about just selling whatever your two and a half million vehicles a year. Your install base, it grows and grows and grows and grows. So one day you have tens of millions of vehicle in your install base. And if you can start monetizing some per month in that install base, actually the lever starts looking quite attractive. So I think we're on to something here. I think it's too early to say how much this economic potential is, but it's there. And if you want to capture it, you need to do things like MBOS so that the infrastructure, the technological infrastructure of your car and the cloud infrastructure that of course goes with that because much of the intelligence is in the cloud. Your customer profile is in the cloud, like in a smartphone. You have to have all those building blocks. If you don't have those, you certainly are.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think you need to offer the customers both. Some customers don't look at the price. They just want the best product, the most desirable product and go like whatever it costs, just let me pay now and that's it. So you kind of have to have that option as well. But I think you can add functionality as you go along. And then through the App Store, just let people choose what they want. And we have the App Store today. So it's not something that is in the future. When I get the financial report every month, I look at, you know, how much money did we generate through the App Store, which is, you know, true digital recurring revenue. It's not enough that I have to do an ad hoc for a positive profit warning. We're not at that stage yet. But I look at that number and one thing I see is that number every month is bigger than the month before. And here it comes with the whole idea of an installed base.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who knows? I think we have to be creative about it, but one thing we know for sure is that the digital side of the vehicle, in our case, also kind of the aesthetically luxury digital feel of the vehicle, it's a crucial buying criteria to invest into this field is a must, is an absolute must for us. And it needs to feel like a Mercedes. It can't be too generic. Yes, the functionality needs to be clear. It needs to be intuitive and everything that you expect. But at Mercedes, aesthetically, it needs to go a little bit beyond that and also think about how you integrate the body functions of the vehicle with that digital world. So do I think we can make money with it? Yes. Do I know exactly how much? No, but there is potential there. And if we want to reap the benefit of that potential, we got to have the technology in the car. And that's why we're doing this.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You kind of get with your smartphone, but the way you present it in the car and you turn it into a holistic experience, even your car could be an autonomous boat. It could be a 4D cinema. We have boosters, even loudspeaker boosters in the seat to give you a 4D sound. It's amazing if you get an S class or an EQS or something, you try it out, it kind of blows you away. You can even work with the cart to use your air conditioning, your scent, sound, everything light to create the best movie experience that you've ever had. Could you monetize that probably? Could you put digital art onto the passenger front screen of your car to just enjoy, maybe even sell NFT art?”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think it's a bit of both. Yeah, if you get yourself the new EQS and you get that absolutely insane hyperscreen that covers the whole dashboard. That in itself, it's almost like tech art. It's that beautiful. And yeah, you charge for that, but you don't charge for just for the screen. You charge for the functionality that comes with it. So now that you have the car in the field, where's the potential for recurring revenues? I see good potential for this, one of the most obvious domains is one of the things that it's all about, getting from A to B as we add more autonomous functions to the vehicle and through software updates, it becomes more and more capable. And we have a super computer processor in the vehicle and enough storage space so we can make the car better over the years. I definitely think that we can monetize that. So Autonomous Drive is one area. Smart charging is another area. In the infotainment domain, we'll have to see. Much of the infotainment”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's more like a river flowing and that river never ends and you add more water to it. So more software dumps onto the main stack. And that's why you have to also look at backwards compatibility when you develop this.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One domain. You have the drive domain. You have the autonomous drive domain. You have the whole body domain. You have to get all of those things to speak to each other. So the infrastructure layer and the middleware of your software stack horizontally goes across. So to get that right, I think it's very, very, very important. And that's why we take so much time in the concept engineering of the software stack as we go into an era where then the whole car is downloadable. And you're right, you cannot leave that car stranded out there. Customers would not accept that. So we will keep those alive. But maybe a bit, you know, like Apple with iOS and the iPhone, you can constantly update your iPhone with the latest software. So now you don't have a generation where you kind of, you do a generation for two or three years and then you kill it and then you start from scratch and do another generation. It's not like that.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have gathered a lot of experience in the last four years with millions of connected cars, keeping them fresh, making sure that everything is perfect and that every time you do a software dump, that it's not like sometimes that you experienced with your computer, you turn it on, it kind of doesn't work. That wouldn't be a great thing with a car. It always has to work and it needs to be reliable, it needs to be safe. So in terms of job profiles, you're absolutely right. We're adding a lot of software engineers that we in the past, maybe the work was done by our suppliers, by our partners. And now we do more of it in-house. If you look at the software stack, the MBOS software stack, to get the architects drawing for the fundamentals of that stack is really, really important. And let's not forget here, people usually think when they think about this, they think about the infotainment domain, you know, navigation and communication and entertainment and so on. But it's only...”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is the thing with automotive. It's not something that you have on your desk at home, you know, in ambient temperature, sitting still all the time. This is a moving machine that can go from, I guess, minus 40 degrees C to 60 degrees, shaking and moving all the time. So if you want to take that computer into automotive grade, it's a bigger challenge. But it's a challenge that we have been working on for a hundred plus years. So we're making that computer more robust, if you will. The download capability and keeping it fresh is hugely important. We're not waiting for our first full MBOS version that we launch in the latter half of 2024 for this. We actually started already four years ago in 2018 with what we called MBUX, our infotainment domain”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This whole construct is then totally over the air, downloadable. So every single aspect and function of the car, you can address with more technology, better software as the vehicle is in the market. So it's a paradigm shift here. It's going to make the product better. It's also going to make it fresher. So here is another difference to the past. In the past, you bought your car, you drove off the lot, it was like the peak technology of that product. That point forward, it started to age. In the case of a Mercedes age like a French wine, so it can also get better with time. But now essentially, when you drive off the lot, you don't reach peak technology because we can send more technology to you after the purchase. That's what the digital side is all about.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now let's stand back here and see is this going to work as we get more processing power, better sensors, better software we can use artificial intelligence. We have a learning vehicle. And we said no, that American quilt of ECUs that you have to kind of sew together is not going to work. It's going to be too complicated. So we're now creating one holistic software stack. Yes, that stack has different layers and also several domains, but it is approached as we architect it as one house with different rooms in it. Together with that comes then a consolidated EE architecture. So less computers, less ECUs, but more powerful computers.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So next to the revolution that is going on on the drivetrain switching from one technology to another one, I think we are also seeing a paradigm shift of how you approach software and the electric electronic architecture in a vehicle. For the longest time, like the last three decades or so, it has been a task where we have integrated a bunch of ECUs, small computers that came with software packages. And we were the ultimate vehicle integrators taking all these ECUs and all these software packages, all those functions and making them into a coherent product that works in all dimensions. I think we have come to the end of that era now, and it's almost like you start with a white sheet of paper. We call it MBOS, Mercedes-Benz Operating System, where you say,”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to sit and reflect, digest that information, also use a little bit of your intuition and your experience and make a decision and then try to win your team around that decision.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do I make decisions? I can't pull out the manual out of the drawer and read, you know, do step one, two, three, four. I would say. I do gather a lot of information. I'm curious. I do listen to a lot of people. I like differing opinions so that you don't just talk to a bunch of yes men. If you're at the top of a company in a hierarchy, sometimes you have the tendency that people, you know, they tell you what they think you want to hear. I try to also speak to people that I know will also say what I don't want to hear to go through that challenge. And sometimes you then have to sit back and digest and compute. And I had this experience actually at the beginning of the pandemic when we were all in lockdown. I choose to do the lockdown in the office, even if I was sitting more or less alone in the office. Because I wasn't traveling anymore. I had much more time than I had before, time to reflect. And sometimes sitting alone in the evening after you've had a marathon of video conferences.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100% electric if that market is ready. So that's what we're going for. What's the metric that we will watch? It's the adoption rate. So, you know, percentage of sales in the years to come, you know, where are we going to be in 2030? How do we ramp up once we go with this EV only architectures? How fast does that go? So we still have some opportunity to tune that and adjust a little bit plus minus. But strategically, we have decided Mercedes is going into this future and we're going to try to make the market by creating the most desirable cars, the most exciting products, electric and digital, and of course beautiful.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“None of us has a crystal ball, so we don't know exactly what the market dynamics in the big market's going to be in 2030. So, you know, what's Europe going to look like? What's the United States? North America going to look like. China is the biggest market and other important markets like Japan, Korea, and so on. So we have to take at this stage a little bit of a guess, but you have to strategically decide who do you want to be? And are you going to try to make the market or wait for the market? We have decided that we want to make the market. So if it is 2030 or 2030 plus X, I don't think it matters that much plus minus a couple of years here or there. As you say, 2030 in auto terms is really tomorrow. It's kind of the next gen architectures. And that's why we made the decision that from 25 forward, all new architectures will be EV only. Thereby we can put ourselves in a position to serve a market.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we're very confident that on the way to 2030, which is our aggressive goal of being able to go all electric, we can do the people transformation as well.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A gradual switch over there as well. Yes, some of those facilities, some of those factories eventually in terms of the physical buildings will be retired once you step out of combustion production, but you move people across. And in R&D, it's already the case that the people that work on the electric drivetrain and the people that work on the combustion powertrain, it's almost like you can meander back and forth between those two. And many people that used to be some of our best engineers in the combustion world, they're already since a couple of three years on the electric side. So we're not leaving anybody from the team behind. We know we have a big transformation task. We know that that's also a people transformation task, a training task.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the destination that we're going is an all electric destination. So look at production for a second. We have the plants where we build the cars and we have the plants where we build the powertrain. In our car plants, we have already more or less converted all of our assembly plants to dual use already. And they will gradually then flip over as the take rate for EVs go up to EV only. And then you rightly point out that you have some dedicated facilities that build combustion engines and, for instance, transmissions to go with those combustion engines. We most recently here at the headquarters at one of the original locations of Mercedes, which is a traditional powertrain, tech location and production location, we have decided to invest many hundreds of millions industrializing both the R&D and Tech Center for Batteries as well as the next gen e-drive train.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if we look at this in more detail, especially the industrial footprint, but also the R&D footprint, you're absolutely right that our high-tech electrified combustion-based vehicles, they will continue to produce positive cash flows and delight customers around the world for many years to come.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all because the attitude of our brand and our Mercedes is there is no such thing as kind of yesterday's business and tomorrow's business. There's only one Mercedes-Benz, that Mercedes-Benz is going into the future. We have made a clear and definitive decision. We're going all in on electric. In fact, as of 2025, all new architectures, vehicle architectures from Mercedes, on which we will have several different models will be electric only. So we didn't want to create a future team and a current team or past team. Also, the psychology of the organization is that everybody's working on the future. And that future is zero emission. So it doesn't make sense for us to split the company. We're going to take the whole company into that electric and digital future. There is one Mercedes-Benz brand promise, one team spirit, and one joint future.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said you had to reinvent the whole product, you had to reinvent the whole car. That's obviously a reference to EVs. There's one more split you could do. Ford just did something along these lines. They said we're going to have an internal combustion business and an EV business. And they're going to be different. And we're just going to split those up so the EV people can focus and then our legacy car business can focus. You have two products, right? You have the EQ products, which are your EVs, and you have the traditional products. Are you thinking of a further split along those lines?”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One stock and create entrepreneurial energy around that. So speed. Entrepreneurship, those are the main reasons why we split the company.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's say Class A trucks have fundamentally different customer groups. One customer group is looking for that something special going from A to B in style. The other one is looking for a high-tech product, very TCO total cost of ownership driven transport good where it comes down to the last cent per mile. So we said, let's make the company, even though it's a huge group more nimble, more fast, get rid of the two-tier decision-making process, both in the management board and on the supervisory boards, have an undivided 100% focus on our customers. And also in a way, especially for the truck guys, which was a large business, but the smaller business inside the group, let's put them out there in the spotlight and release some entrepreneurial energy by listing this stock so you get the whole attention of the financial market on that.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Daimler had forever in a day been a conglomerate with two main industrial businesses. On the one hand, the cars, everybody knows Mercedes-Benz, luxury tech car company. But at the same time, with Daimler trucks, it is the world's leading, the world's biggest commercial vehicle producer. And it comes from the history of the company that Gottlieb Daimler actually, he didn't just invent the car, he invented the truck and all other things that was propelled by a combustion engine back then. When we started this discussion internally to essentially break up the company and create two pure play entities, it's really the transformation that the auto industry is going through that was the spark of this. In this age of transformation, we have to reinvent the original invention. What we need is speed, speed and decision making, speed in innovation. And if you look at it, luxury cars.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty straightforward. We're a luxury in a tech car company. We have a management board and a supervisory board naturally. We run the company functionally as most car companies do it. We have an R&D department production operations and marketing and sales and then the other supporting functions. We used to be part of a conglomerate, as you know, called Daimler, but we decided to split the company last year. So since beginning of this year, it is purely Mercedes-Benz.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say that's a typical German thing. That's what it ends up if you translate my German title. So it sounds all very complicated, but the gist of it is I'm the CEO of Mercedes-Benz.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, you told me at the beginning to just introduce you as the CEO of Mercedes-Benz, but you have these complicated titles that I want to understand. You are also the chairman of the board of management of the Mercedes-Benz Group AG. You're also the head of Mercedes. Just explain what all that means to us.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To EV Computers Of cars is Products Mercedes itself is a tech company. Actually, he A luxury tech company, which yeah, it's Mercedes. The company has plans to electrify all of its cars, its shipping to new EVs right now, the EQS and EQE. Both of them have massive infotainment screen inside that run Mercedes proprietary MBUx system, which even has its own voice assistant called Hey Mercedes. Where all that tech comes from, how it gets updated, and how car companies pay to support our new rolling computers over time are still open questions. And Ola is clear that Mercedes is still experimenting with the answers, but that it's important to him that they own the primary user experience in the car. Of course, we talked about the usual EV topics like charging networks and interoperability. Ola's got a pretty good line about Elon and LinkedIn in there, which made me laugh. And then, of course, I had to ask about Apple's recent announcement that the next version of CarPlay would be able to take over every display in the car, including the instrument cluster.”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Patel, Week on Decoder. I'm talking to Mercedes CEO. Ola Schlane. Been CEO Actually, been Far longer. He's worked at the company since 1993. During that run, Mercedes first spent time getting a lot bigger. The company famously merged with Chrysler for a while, forming a giant Called Chrysler, but over the past few years, it's actually been getting much smaller and more focused. The Chrysler deal was, of course, undone, but recently Ola spun off the truck division. Into its own public company. Called Trucks, leaving Mercedes Premium We talked a lot about. Interesting Car companies Consol Into giant conglom”
2022-06-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius is refocusing for an electric future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT