Daimler Magazine

What a journey it has been: born in Massachusetts, educated in Savannah, lived in California and now – I’m in Atlanta. There’s a lot going on around me at the Grand Opening of Daimler’s incubator Lab1886 in the US where I will be its CEO – I realize, this is the right step!

I’ve just returned from my first trip to the RISE (riseconf) conference in Hong Kong – and I must admit: I expected the largest tech-conference in Asia to be … slightly larger. Yet I quickly learned that while other conferences may be bigger, this one goes deeper …

A sales representative’s car is virtually his second living room. I use my car not only to travel from A to B but also as the place where I do a lot of my work, as well as spending many lunch breaks in it. I have a very special relationship with my car. Today I’d like to tell you the story of how we’ve traveled 1,000,000 kilometers together.

Softly humming, the new Mercedes-Benz eCitaro rolls into the gigantic Hall 45 in Mainz for its first official presentation to the public. The project team has transformed the rustic industrial architecture of the hall into an impressive showcase for the event. Almost 200 journalists from 15 countries are covering the presentation.

Back in 1995, I was a “lateral entrant” into the Daimler Group as the Head of Communications of Mercedes-Benz. At that time, preparations for the launch of the smart brand were in full swing, providing plenty of material for discussions between advocates and opponents of this revolutionary concept of a new kind of urban mobility. Now we are celebrating 20 years of smart – a personal review.

Yes, I know what many of you might be thinking at this moment: Oh no — not another one of these hip and oh so popular startup conferences where we suddenly want to present ourselves as a cool and progressive company.

A sudden handicap is not the kind of story you can tell from time to time as an amusing anecdote or an interesting tale. So you might be wondering why I like to tell it anyway. I tell my story because it shows that even in a global company such as Daimler it’s possible to find something like a second family. That’s because what my colleagues did for me after I had a serious accident was incredible.

Do you recognize this yellow US school bus? That one taking kids to their high schools in the films and series made in Hollywood? It comes from Daimler. You say you didn’t know that before? Well, now you do.

There are no boundaries on the search for the hottest startups, and definitely no country boundaries. This is why our STARTUP AUTOBAHN team in Stuttgart is not just looking for attractive startups from the local area.

The second day of our eDrive@VANs press test-drive in Hamburg is over and I’m more than proud of my team and our performance. Based on the reactions of those attending, I can tell that we’ve adopted exactly the right approach at Mercedes-Benz Vans with our customer-centric thinking.