Home / News / The good oil: Mercedes-Benz has invented another car
Mercedes-Benz (or at least the company that created MB) is widely credited with inventing the automobile.
But which car? Karl Benz’s patented motor car (below) from 1886 is mostly in the spotlight, also because his wife Bertha Benz made it famous with the first roadie, the invention of petrol stations and modern brakes. She also helped fund the entire project.
But that’s all a story for another day. Because the motor vehicle isn’t really a car, is it? Unless there’s a challenger brand in the market that sells family models with three crank wheels and a steering tiller that puts you high on top of a panting engine.
Fortunately for MB, this also resulted in the first example of what we could actually recognize as a car: the 35 PS Mercedes. In 1900 the Austrian entrepreneur Emil Jellinek commissioned Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft (DMG) to manufacture a “sports car” for his racing team. Company engineer Wilhelm Maybach got the job.
Jellinek wanted the 5.9 liter engine to be low-mounted, with a long wheelbase and wide track for good handling. He wanted to start electrically; because cranking is not cool.
The finished Maybach product also featured camshafts instead of the more common vacuum valves and a world’s first honeycomb cooler, which reduced the amount of coolant required.
A new thing called the “steering wheel” was also used. Earlier cars featured the device, but this was the first time it was used in a vehicle designed from the ground up, rather than being essentially a horseless carriage.
This new machine had the basic elements that we now consider key to the concept of a “car”. Jellinek was so pleased he named it after his daughter Mercedes.
In 1901 it dominated the Nizza-La Turbie motorsport event with a record average speed of 51.4 km / h. Paul Meyan, General Secretary of the Automobile Club de France, said: “We have entered the Mercedes era”. Nice. In Nice.
DMG added two more seats and some additional bodywork to the 35 hp and produced a street version.
It was not until 1926 that the various threads of this story flowed into a company called “Mercedes-Benz”, but it all began here with the invention of the car. No, not this car. This car.
