Mercedes Has Finally Figured Out A Way To Sell Modern Headlights That Don’t Cost $1 Billion To Replace

If you’ve ever dealt with replacing a modern headlight assembly before, you’ll know they’re insanely expensive. The pods that hold the lights, daytime-running lights, and turn signals can easily cost four figures.

Because they’re usually sealed together with glue, replacing individual parts within the assembly is a huge pain, to the point where it’s actually cheaper to buy a whole new unit. For years now, owners and insurance companies have had to front massive costs to get headlights fixed, even when there’s only minor damage.

Mercedes, under the guise of wishing to make it easier for scrapyards to disassemble and recycle parts, finally has a solution—one that I hope the rest of the industry follows.

Mercedes Wants To Make Sure Its Cars Are Easy To Recycle

Have you ever wondered what happens to a car when it’s no longer viable as a car? Whether it’s been crashed, broken to the point of being too expensive to fix, or rusted to the point of being unsafe to drive, cars like this usually end up in a junkyard to be salvaged.

Even if a car can’t be driven anymore, it still has some value. Cars are complex machines with a lot of different parts, which means even worthless examples usually have working or undamaged pieces that can be salvaged and sold (glass, body panels, interior pieces, wheels, etc.), and metals that can be recycled. This is how salvage yards make their money.

Because cars are made up of so many different materials and assembled in increasingly intricate ways, it’s impossible to recycle everything from a vehicle in a reasonable time frame. Taking apart a modern car by hand, with all of its wiring, glue, welds, and fittings, can take weeks. So a lot of recyclable materials end up in the trash because they’d take too long to separate from the rest of the car. There usually isn’t much delicacy when it comes to this type of work:

Mercedes, realizing a lot of materials that could’ve been recycled in the dismantling process are ending up in the trash, never to be used again, has launched a new initiative within the company called Tomorrow XX. The program is taking a look at more than 40 components, reengineering them to reduce their carbon footprint and make them easier to use again as raw materials. From the release:

At the end of a vehicle’s lifecycle, Mercedes-Benz wants to close the loop and return as many recyclable materials as possible to the system. The prerequisite for material recycling is ensuring components are easy to dismantle and that different materials can be separated by type.

How, exactly, does Mercedes plan to do this? Less glue and less welding, by the sounds of it.

Finally, A Modern-Day Headlight That Makes Sense

Previously, replacing something as simple as a headlight lens or bulb on a modern headlight assembly would take a ton of hours and a lot of painstaking glue-related work, where you’d have to heat up the glue and peel apart delicate pieces of plastic. Do it wrong, and you’ll end up breaking something (ask me how I know). Mercedes’ new headlight concept sidesteps all of that with an exceedingly simple method:

The various components such as the lens, cover trim and frame, housing and electronics are joined with fasteners rather than glue (today’s standard practice). As a result, the headlight can be separated into individual components with ease and without damage. This means individual components can be replaced, making a modern headlight repairable for the first time. Following a stone chip, for instance, there is no need to replace the entire headlight, just the lens. For customers, this could make repairs more efficient in future. The longer service life of headlights could also help conserve resources and minimize carbon emissions.

This is exactly how headlight assemblies used to be, when stuff was easy to fix. I feel like this sort of fastening method could’ve been reimplemented on modern headlights years ago, when manufacturers started realizing how expensive and annoying dealing with glue was. Alas, it was probably quicker and cheaper to use glue, which is why virtually every headlight assembly still uses it.

Mercedes goes on to say that each part of the headlight is made from one specific material, making those parts easier to sort for reuse or recycling. The company estimates that using this type of assembly could reduce carbon emissions by nearly 50 percent by saving on manufacturing. I’m just happy it won’t cost owners an arm and a leg to replace a cracked lens anymore.

Headlights are just the tip of the iceberg for Mercedes. It provides the door panel, a shockingly complicated part in 2025, as another example:

A similarly complex component are interior door panels, which consist of different parts joined by ultrasonic welding. Mercedes-Benz has developed a new joining technology to better and more easily separate individual materials. The adapted thermoplastic rivet is now easy to undo, allowing faster separation of individual components without damage. Optimizing dismantling in this way both simplifies repair and improves recyclability. The new technology could potentially replace a large number of thermoplastic joints in vehicle interiors.

Having dealt with the horrors of disassembling glued-together headlight assemblies and door panels in the past, I really think Mercedes is onto something here. Even if there was no environmental benefit here, I’d be really into this idea, because it makes the lives of repair workers and disassembly facilities way easier. Every other automaker should take notice.

Top graphic images: Mercedes-Benz