Mercedes Citan van to bypass Australia

Mercedes-Benz Australia had planned to bring the Citan to Australia from the middle of this year in order to fill a hole below the mid-sized Vito van but pulled the pin on the plan just before Christmas.

The Citan is based on the Renault Kangoo. It has so much in common with the donor car that Renault actually builds them on the same production line. The new load-hauler got off to a bad start in Europe, where it scored a Euro NCAP safety rating of three stars and put Mercedes in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. It has since been re-jigged and achieved four stars, but is well short of the five-star ratings Mercedes-Benz Australia is used to.

Even the existing Vito van is available with a five-star safety rating, something Mercedes has made a lot of with its marketing activities. Because the Citan is based on the Renault, there is no diesel automatic version available and Mercedes was not prepared to develop one -- a  process that would have been costly and taken at least 18 months.

Mercedes Australia says this is the real reason it is not going to take the Citan and insists the four-star crash safety rating did not matter. "We just can't get the specification we want," says Mercedes-Benz Australia public relations chief, David McCarthy. "Without a diesel automatic, we just wouldn't sell enough to make it viable."

He says the Kangoo and therefore the Citan wasn't developed with a diesel automatic originally because there is little demand for the combination in Europe. "In other places having no diesel automatic is not a big deal, but it is in Australia," he says.

McCarthy says Mercedes-Benz would have been at a significant disadvantage to Volkswagen, which sells the Caddy in the same segment with a diesel automatic in several variations, if it had brought in manual only diesel Citans.