I would reserve that (it won't be available before 2020 and they have yet to have the battery production ready to make the car in volume!). Tesla's Model Y will be presented in a few months.
I seriously doubt that Mercedes will be able to make good EV in volume before Tesla.
This. EV production comes down entirely to battery availability. It looks like Mercedes is making the same mistake as Nissan initially did, and thinking they can roll their own battery tech and production facilities. They would be far better off striking deals with LG or Panasonic as the rest outside of Tesla have done. The 64kWh 2019 Nissan leaf (only real competitor to Model 3) will be using LG chem batteries, as does the Chevy Bolt/Volt.
There's absolutely no way Mercedes will make up for a 15 year head start on battery tech that Tesla has. I'd expect to see them building EVs at $100k+ MSRP and quantities under 20k/year, and having serious battery degradation issues along with other idiosyncrasies of LiPo chemistry that have taken decades to work out in large scale manufacturing. They will be making small batches of pricey luxury EVs while Tesla, Nissan, and GM are producing millions of units for the masses in 5 years.
Same with Tesla.
No other Western automakers has even plan to achieve half of that.
your original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17910814
Speculating about vaporware gigafactories is just that, speculation. Until they're actually building cars at scale--any kind of cars--I would take any promises about future production capacity with the same grain of salt as Elon's impulsive tweets about "funding secured".
ICE cars, yes. However EV's are completely constrained by battery production, which Mercedes has literally not even begun to develop. It's a completely different comparison.