Mercedes got caught trashing a rental Tesla Model X

This is actually fairly common, and it's actually standard to rent the vehicles.

When I was a contractor for MAC tools, they would rent cars for the week from the local Hertz branch, documenting the tear down for one of their products, and then disassemble, and then reassemble them during that work week, returning the rental vehicle on Friday.

Hertz didn't seem to mind -- I asked the Hertz manager the next time I was renting a car from there why they did it, and he openly told me that he could charge them 6 times the normal weekly rate (which looked good for his numbers), he would drive any vehicle returned for the next week to make sure there weren't any issues, and that the dealership would still warranty any damages, so, he saw it as a win/win...

...I'm not so certain that I'd take a risk like that, though.

Just for the record, the first linked article from spiegel.de is not about Daimler and Tesla, but about Daimler and Deutsche Post (the former federal Postal Service, no a semi-private company). The latter has just recently developed its own electric delivery truck, and Daimler rented a demonstration vehicle via a letterbox company, but got caught by a GPS tracker in the car.

From what I know, this is not only a normal thing to do, everybody is doing it. The reason for renting the car and not buying it is not only because it is much faster to get your hands on the car, much cheaper and much easier, but what would they do with do many cars that should be bought after disassembling them and doing whatever they want to do? They do not do this for every car, but with so many manufacturers and car models every year this could well be 50 cars a year. An interesting thing I know is that it could take 2 days to disassemble the rented car, one day of photoshoot and then two days of assembling the car back. And even for experienced people like them breaking some parts while disassembling is also a normal thing. So very often cable ties are used to hold some plastics or other parts together. Important is that they are not visible during visual inspection when they return the car back

The article didn't address why Daimler rented the car instead of purchasing it. Were they just being cheap? Was stock of the car unavailable? Did they anticipate counterespionage from Tessa if they purchased a unit above board?

This is so weird, I'm curious why would a company like Mercedes do something like this? Surely they can afford to buy it, and then they won't have to go around vandalising other people's cars.

They do it this way so there is no 'special treatment' from the manufacturer. They know they are getting the same build that any Jo Public would.

Lmao seriously? How could they not afford to just buy one for their own uses? I can't believe the level of unprofessionalism here.