World's first car with vegan certified interior.

Customers can be confident that all surfaces made using the high-quality ARTICO leather replica as well as all textiles used in the vehicle don’t contain any products of animal origin. The Vegan Society  has also certified that across all stages of production and processing, no ingredients or additives of animal origin – either processed or unprocessed – have been added or used in any form. The certified Vegan Package will be introduced as an interior option with the new GLC: Starting with the vehicle’s sales release, the package will be labelled with the well-known “Vegan Trademark” of The Vegan Society in the Mercedes-Benz vehicle configurator.

As part of its development of vegan interior fittings, Mercedes-Benz has set itself the goal of testing the components of the materials used to ensure that it can offer customers vegan interior fittings with the greatest level of safety and transparency. To facilitate this, the company has brought in the expertise of the independent NGO The Vegan Society. In a first step, interior materials currently available in vehicles with the Mercedes-Benz star – as well as the processes used to manufacture them – were audited by The Vegan Society in a pilot project. This included soft-touch surface materials such as leather replica, microfibre fleece and other textiles. If there were any indications that they contained animal-based components, the materials underwent further development in a second step, in cooperation with the respective supplier, and the affected components were replaced by other, animal-free components or auxiliaries. The fundamental prerequisite was that the materials had to meet the high Mercedes-Benz standards of quality and perceived value.

This step was followed by independent audit and certification by The Vegan Society. The system for vegan products audited a total of around 100 material components from various Mercedes-Benz suppliers in accordance with its certification standards. The globally recognised “Vegan Trademark” is only awarded to successfully certified products that have been manufactured and/or developed without the use of any animal products, by-products or derivatives and that have additionally not involved testing of any sort on animals. Any potential cross-contamination with animal-derived ingredients must be prevented as far as it is practical and possible. These high standards were particularly important to Mercedes-Benz in its choice of which certification organisation to work with.

With the new GLC with EQ Technology, The Vegan Society has awarded its globally recognised “Vegan Trademark” to a vehicle interior for the first time. Mercedes-Benz has intentionally avoided limiting its certified Vegan Package to the seat surfaces alone – but instead has also included many other components and parts that customers come into regular physical contact with. These include exposed surfaces such as seat and steering wheel covers, the headliner, door sills, pillars, doors, sun visors, the centre console and instrument panel, as well as the carpeting used in the footwells and boot. Many of these materials used also have a high recycled-material content. The Vegan Package will initially be available in the new GLC via the configurator, with additional models to follow.