Mercedes Gets Pixelated With Its New EV Grille
The German automaker goes to great artistic lengths to prove it originated the look.
Big pixels! Ever since computers got to the point that they could render fake images indistinguishable from photographs, people seem eager for a return to the glory days when 256x240 was considered super-high-res. The retro-gaming movement and Minecraft boosted the pixelated design ethic, and Hyundai has put it to good use in its Ioniq 5, 6, and 9 EVs and the gas-powered Santa Fe—but now Mercedes-Benz has a pixelated EV grille of its own, and dammit, the company want us to know it got there first … with the first Gallery of Grilles we’ve ever seen.
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The new grille will make its debut on the 2027 Mercedes-Benz GLC with EQ Technology—that’s Mercedes new-speak for the battery-powered version of its bestseller, the GLC compact luxury SUV—and will adorn future EVs, as well. Consisting of 942 square pixels illuminated by 140 or so LEDs, the new grille will display greeting and parting animations, including a cool “breathing” screen that pulses as the GLC EV awaits its owner's finger on the start button. At night the grille settles into a unique pattern that will make the electric Benz easy to identify in the rearview mirror of any lowly Hyundai, and by day, it looks like—well, it looks like a classic Mercedes grille.
To eliminate those visions of Hyundais dancing through our heads, the company set up an honest-to-goodness grille gallery. Black-draped walls were decorated with decades of Benz schnozollas, each on its own mount, like the thesis project of an art major whose parents owned a junkyard. Mercedes presented evidence that the square-pixel look originated with the 1902 Mercedes Simplex, which used a honeycomb arrangement of square-shaped tubes designed to improve airflow. The company picked up this square-pixel grille theme again in the 1950s, and we’ve seen it, on and off and in some form or other, ever since.
Like the new grille? Good, because Mercedes tells us the GLC will be the first of several electric vehicles to wear this new visage. Will folks recognize it as a distinctive Mercedes touch, or will they be put in the mind of a certain Korean automaker? As marketing geniuses Jack Trout and Al Ries wrote, it is better to be the first than it is to be better, but it is also better to be thought of to be the first than to actually be the first. Which way will minds go? We suppose that depends on what the rest of the GLC looks like. We got a preview in the form of a camouflaged prototype (with the nifty new grille covered up, we’re sad to say), but we’ll see what the whole car looks like when it is revealed at Munich’s IAA Mobility show in September.
After a two-decade career as a freelance writer, Aaron Gold joined MotorTrend’s sister publication Automobile in 2018 before moving to the MT staff in 2021. Aaron is a native New Yorker who now lives in Los Angeles with his spouse, too many pets, and a cantankerous 1983 GMC Suburban.
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