Germany Guide
Baden-Württemberg
Mercedes-Benz-Museum
Address: Mercedesstrasse 100
Opening time: Tues– Sun 9am–6pm
Price: €8
Telephone: 0711/173 00 00
Website: www.mercedes-benz.com/museum
While Gottlieb Daimler was locked in his shed, Karl Benz had blazed his own motor trail to found Benz & Cie in 1883, the same year as Daimler, though neither was aware of the other's work. The world's two oldest motor manufacturers united in June 1926 as Daimler-Benz long after Daimler had died and Benz retired. The Mercedes name was introduced in 1902 to honour the daughter of early Austrian dealer Emil Jellinek.
All this is recounted and celebrated by the Mercedes-Benz-Museum, in a landmark futuristic building on the bank of the Neckar, 4km northeast of the city centre and five minutes' walk south of the Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion Bahnhof (S-Bahn S1). It's chock-full of 110 years of immaculate motors and starts with Daimler's pioneering motorbike – a wooden bone-shaker with a horse's saddle – and beside it is the one-cylinder motor-tricycle Motorwagen and motorized carriage Motorkutsche; Benz and Daimler created them independently in 1886, both capable of a not-so-giddy 16kmph. Benz just pipped Daimler to produce the world's first car.
Another trail-blazer is the robust Benz Vélo, the world's first production car, for which twelve hundred of the moneyed elite parted with 20,000 gold Marks. A racy 500K Special Roadster in preening pillarbox red begs for a Hollywood Thirties starlet, but it's the racers that truly quicken the pulse, no more so than the legendary Silver Arrows of the 1920s and 1930s; a cinema shows the sleek machines in action. Just as eye-catching are a pair of experimental record-breakers that look far more futuristic than their dates suggest: in the W125, Rudolf Caracciola clocked up 432.7km per hour on the Frankfurt– Darmstadt Autobahn in 1938 (no one's been faster on a public highway since); and six-wheeler sci-fi vision T80 was powered by an aeroplane engine to 650km per hour in 1939, though World War II killed off the project.