Home of the Silver Arrow – A visit to the Mercedes-Benz Museum

A visit to the Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart, only the day after a trip to the fabulous Porsche museum?

This is almost too much to take. Almost, but then again can you really have too much of a good thing when it comes to cars? We’re about to find out.

After parking up in the Mercedes museum car park, your eyes are instantly drawn to the various models they have dotted around the car park. They look like scaled-up versions of say, the 1:18 sized collectors model they sell. The cars are in glass cases on stands, really alike to the smaller versions that you buy from the gift shop. So it’s a pretty good start to the day. It’s just small touches like that which really whet your appetite for what’s in store for you.

Again, it’s the very meagre sum (for what you get), of €8 to get in to the museum. As you enter, to the left further down the building, and just before the Mercedes in-museum dealership, are some of the ‘young classics’ on display. One model in that section caught my eye. It caught it so badly in fact, that it was watering. No, I was not crying. Okay, I may have been a bit. You’ll understand why when I say that the car in question was the 190E 2.5-16 Evolution in my favourite car colour of gunmetal grey. This was one seriously nice car. It was in amazing condition too. Not only that but it was sale for just over €47,000. Hence the watery eyes. I can’t afford to buy it.

After being dragged away, to stop me stealing it in a desperate attempt to own it for at least a brief moment before I was sent to a German jail, we moved on to the main part of the museum. Walking into the centre of the building, the sheer size and look of it is almost overwhelming. It’s all very futuristic. Not in a cheesy way at all though. Staring up to the ceiling, the inside of the roof looks like it’s straight out of a science-fiction film.

The structure is triangular shaped, to a certain degree, and in the roof are what look like three massive support beams, in white, which have blue lighting in the centre of them. Silently travelling up and down the three walls of the museum are three of the coolest lifts I’ve ever seen. They are hugely influenced by art deco styling. The only way that I can think to describe them is that they look similar to the front of the trains you’d see in painted posters from the 1940s and ’50s. Very smooth and rounded, with a small slit of a window for seeing out of. As they go up and down the walls, they project giant pictures, onto the opposite walls, of former racing heroes and cars. The shape of the building apparently helps if there’s ever a fire there, as it basically does the job of a chimney, funnelling the smoke out of the museum and into the sky. Handy when it’s housing millions of pounds of cars.

As with the Porsche museum, you can request an electronic audio guide for more in-depth explanations of the cars and displays. After picking one up, we enter one of the art-deco elevators and start ascending to the first part of the museum. The interior of the lift is decorated in alcantara or suede – the type you find some Mercedes car seats are made of, and the thin slit of a window allows you to see the pictures projected onto the walls opposite the lift.

As the lift gets nears the top of the building, galloping horse hoof noises are played in the elevator, much to everyone’s surprise. As the doors open though, all is explained. A full size stuffed horse is displayed, along with a quote from Kaiser Wilhelm 2nd with his statement from 1905. ” I believe in horses”, he says, “Automobiles are a passing phenomenon “. Well I agree with him to a certain extent, and I believe in horses too, except the ones I’m talking about are shoe-horned into various engine bays.

The Kaiser couldn’t have been more wrong, as the Mercedes-Benz museum shows with a great deal of delight.

There’s so much to see that getting around it will take a full days exploring. It starts off with the very earliest Daimlers such as the 1889 Daimler Stahlradwagen and the 1907 Mercedes Simplex Reisewagen, which was built for successful businessman and investor in Daimler, Emil Jellinek.

Interestingly, as Herr Jellinek invested so much money in Daimler, the models from then on were subsequently named after his daughter Mercedes, hence the manufacturers name now.

After this, you move around the museum down floor by floor, with two displays per level. The displays start with the earliest car and go forward in time. The cars are simply beautiful once you move into the early 1900s, the attention to detail is huge on these cars, making them all the more attractive. One of my favourite Mercedes of the 1930s is the 500 K Spezial-Roadster in Red. It is one of the best looking cars of the era and would have cost a staggering £86,000 (€98,000, $120,000), a huge amount back then. As Mercedes put it, this was “a car of the rich and the beautiful”.

Then there are some vehicles that are just too interesting to pass on. One such is the Mercedes-Benz Rennwagen-Schnelltransporter. This was a purpose-built transporter and was affectionally known as the ‘Blue Wonder’. It would chauffeur race vehicles in 1955 at speeds of up to 106 mph. The aerodynamics of it are wonderful, and it’s really nice just to look at. On the back of the transporter is a 300 SLR from the same era, and what’s very noticeable is the similarities in styling of both vehicles. The technicians that built the Rennwagen very obviously made the rear of the transporter look much alike the 300 SLR.

Talking of the 300 series, that was another model that I was excited to see. The 300 SL Coupé, or Gullwing, as it’s commonly known. The interior itself is a work of art., and is very driver-orientated. The dials and milled switchgear are beautiful beyond belief. Another lesser known model from the 300 series is the 300 SLR ‘Uhlenhaut-Coupé’. Everyone knows the famous 1955 Mille-Miglia winning 300 SLR, which was driven to victory by Sir Stirling Moss, right? Well the SLR ‘Uhlenhaut-Coupé’ was a hardtop version and was built for the 1956 race-season, but was never used due to Mercedes ceasing its racing in 1955. The reason for the name was that Rudolf Uhlenhaut, head of the test department at that time, instead used it as a company car. Some company car eh! Slightly more exciting than a VW Passat or a Ford Mondeo. I like the guys thinking, ‘why let a good car go to waste’. Nicely done.

There’s floor after floor of interesting and unusual cars. Examples include the fully armoured 600 Pullman Staatslimousine, the ML 320 from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park sequel and Ringo Starr’s (of Beatles fame) 190 E 2.3 AMG, which he had had converted from a standard 190E.

The last floor was excellent. All around the edge of the museum were row upon row of Mercedes-Benz racing cars from all different backgrounds. From their racing trucks to F1 cars to Le Mans and DTM racers. Occasionally, out of nowhere, the sound of one of the cars starts. It seems to start right where that particular vehicle is, say Sir Stirling Moss’s 300 SLR ‘722′. The ‘engine’ fires into life and blips a couples of times, then the noise sets off around the edge, changing gears and disappears off into the distance, reappearing in your eardrums, at a high speed and does a fly-by. The sound is seriously good quality, and you really feel as if you are there when the car or truck is doing a fast lap. Amazing. There were more than one or two grins in the crowds as the various models fired up their engines through the speakers. Whoever thought of that needs a round of applause. Well done Sir!

After finishing this, there’s a chance to have a coffee or a Coke break in the cool café (the seats have armrests, just like a car). You need the rest, as tackling the next part of the museum will seriously tax your feet (and wallet). The gift shop. A place where no-ones money is safe. Even the tightest of people will end up spending some money, whether it be a just a pen, a model car or some other piece of Mercedes merchandise, you WILL be sucked into the whole experience. Okay so I did admittedly buy a 1:18 scale 1960s 230 SL. Worth every cent of €50 too, I keep convincing myself.

This Mercedes Museum didn’t ever fail to impress, whichever display or floor level you are on. There’s something for all aspects of car fan. Racer, classic, supercar, unique or just concept.

So was it all too much to take in after all? No, and you really cannot have too much of a good thing when it comes to cars.

Click here to visit the Stuttgart Mercedes-Benz Museum website

All photos taken with a Nikon D90 DSLR