Mercedes-Benz Museum

The Collection

The first room shows how quickly the engine left the road. In the same room as the replicas of the Benz Patent Motor Car of 1886 and Gottlieb Daimler’s riding car of 1885 stand a motorboat and a replica of Friedrich Hermann Wölfert’s airship of 1888, both driven by Daimler engines, and a Daimler lorry of 1898, by the museum’s account the oldest goods vehicle in existence. Within a dozen years of the first motor car, the engine had gone to sea, into the air and to work.

In a room lined with brass stands the car of the man who gave Mercedes its name. Emil Jellinek raced Daimler cars at Nice under the name of his daughter, Mercedes, from 1899, and in 1900 he ordered 36 cars from Daimler. By the end of that year the name had passed to the 35 PS model, and from there to everything that followed. His own 60 PS Mercedes Simplex is here. Brass was a fitting choice for these walls.

In 1955, two coupés were built from the 300 SLR, the racing car that won the Mille Miglia that spring. They were built to race; they never did. At the end of the season Mercedes-Benz withdrew from motor racing, and Rudolf Uhlenhaut, the engineer whose name they carry, took them as his company cars. It was, by any measure, a generous company car. On 5 May 2022, at a private auction held inside this museum, one of the two was sold for €135 million, at the time the highest price ever paid for a car. The money went to a scholarship fund, and the buyer agreed to show the car on special occasions. Its twin never left. It stands in the room of the post-war years, with the 300 SL whose doors open upwards because they had to: the side members of its tubular frame ran so high that a conventional door could not be fitted.

The Gallery of Carriers holds the most charming of the museum’s reconstructions. In 1954, the test department built a transporter to rush the racing cars to the circuits for the following season, and marked its top speed on the rear mudguards: 105 mph, about 170 km/h. It became known as the Blue Wonder. The original did not survive, so the company built it again, and it stands with a 300 SLR lashed to its bed, as it might have arrived at a race in 1955.

The racing cars wait at the end of both routes, on a curve banked ever more steeply, and nearly every one has a story. Among the oldest is the Blitzen-Benz, which Bob Burman drove at 228 km/h at Daytona in 1911. The red car among the silver is no mistake. For the Targa Florio of 1924, the team painted its cars Italian red so that the Sicilian crowds would let them through. This one finished 11th with Christian Lautenschlager; the winning car has been lost.

Here too is the 300 SL that Karl Kling and Hans Klenk drove in the Carrera Panamericana of 1952, the road race across Mexico. At full speed, a vulture came through the windscreen and struck Klenk, injuring him. Bars were fitted across the new glass, and the two drove on to win.

Then comes the 300 SLR with the number 722. In the Mille Miglia of 1955, a thousand miles of open Italian road, Stirling Moss drove it to victory in 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds. Beside him, the journalist Denis Jenkinson wound a scroll of notes through a small box and called the road ahead with hand signals. The number on the car was simply their starting time: 07:22 in the morning.

Where the curve stands vertical, the record cars hang like specimens in a cabinet, and one of them carries the weight of a single day. On 28 January 1938, on the autobahn between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, Rudolf Caracciola drove the W 125 record car to 432.7 km/h. Later that day, Bernd Rosemeyer of Auto Union went out to beat him and was killed on the same road. On the same wall hangs the T 80, built to Ferdinand Porsche’s design for an attempt on the land speed record. The war came first, the project was cancelled in 1940, and the car never ran. It has the stillness of a thing that was never allowed to move.

The Kaiser’s car keeps company in the Gallery of Celebrities, where each car bears the mark of the person it served. There is the armoured 770 Pullman of Emperor Hirohito, chrysanthemums on its doors; the Popemobile, given bulletproof glass after the attempt on the Pope’s life in May 1981; and the last 300 of Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor whose name the model took in popular speech. There is a red 500 SL that Diana, Princess of Wales, took in December 1991 and gave back in September 1992, after criticism at home. And there is the car we would not leave without seeing, the humblest of them all: the 190 SL that the Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott owned from 1959 to 2004, shown as he kept it, unrestored. It stayed on Earth while its owner went to the Moon.