TWICE TO THE BRINK
Perilous circumstances in both 1926 and 1945 forced Daimler-Benz AG to the edge of ruin. Yet each time the company came back stronger than before.
Aritcle Graham Robson
Images Daimler Archives
Without question, Mercedes-Benz today is one of the world’s most respected companies. Not only are its products – cars, trucks and other vehicles – world leaders and world-beaters, but the company’s technology often leads the world. In England, one television commentator recently said, “If you want to know what will be the fashionable features of all cars in 10 years’ time, look at today’s new-model Mercedes. …”
Yet twice in the last century – in 1926 and 1945 – the brand we all find so fascinating came close to complete and utter extinction. How is it that a company so financially on its knees during those years came back so strongly – and each time, within a decade – and once again become a world leader?
Ninety years ago, in fact, both the Benz and Mercedes brands were in financial trouble: Germany’s economy was in tatters and reparations imposed after World War I were crippling the nation. As a result, cost inflation soared to ludicrous levels. In 1923 and ’24, it was said, a workman needed to take a suitcase to work on payday to fill it with a mountain of almost worthless paper money, and the price of everything else (especially cars) increased every day.
Although both Mercedes and Benz were already big players in the German motor industry, there were no fewer than 86 different companies in the listings at the time. All – including Benz and Mercedes – were desperate to fill under-used factories, for it was said that one factory with up-to-date equipment could have supplied the entire faltering German market at that time.
The “Big Merger” – and yes, it was certainly worth noting the merger that took place in 1926 in such terms – came not a moment too soon, for both brands were struggling (see The Star, November-December 2014). Benz, at one time Grand Prix winners, was still building old-fashioned models based on 1914 designs, for it had wasted precious development funds dabbling fruitlessly in building mid-engine cars based on designs by Edmund Rumpler. Mercedes’s parent company Daimler, for its part, had hired that maverick genius Ferdinand Porsche in 1923 as its engineering guru, who then spent too much time – and the company’s money – on the big supercharged 24/100/140 models or in scheming the first of his own rear-engine layouts for which he would later be renowned.
Happily, once the Daimler-Benz colossus was formally ushered into existence June 29, 1926, (and the Mercedes-Benz brand was born), the new management board – pushed by its bankers – decided to concentrate on survival, not glamour. From the end of the 1920s, therefore, ultra-fast supercharged models like the S, SS and SSK types continued to make sporting headlines, but were commercially insignificant. Meanwhile, the money-making models were mostly fitted with side-valve engines and had mundane engineering. But not all of them.
Along the way there would be the 540Ks, the Grossers, the legendary Silver Arrow racecars and the streamlined record cars, which made all the headlines and pushed the technological envelope, but without making any money. Profits – and, thank goodness there were substantial profits – originally came from mundane machines such as the Stuttgart (2-liter), Mannheim (3.1-liter) and Nurburg (4.6-liter) types. But because the Sindelfingen plant was enlarged and modernized so cars could be built efficiently, new cars were coming along.
But not in a rush.
A modern automobile
Spool forward to 1931 when what I call the first true Mercedes-Benz, the Type 170 model, was introduced. By any standards, this was a bold move, for it was at once the smallest and the cheapest car built by Daimler or Benz since before the First World War.
This showed what the company could do for what it then considered its new core market, and founded a pedigree that kept the company alive until the arrival of the magnificent W186 300 in 1951. It was the technical department under Hans Nibel, who took over from Porsche in 1928, which should take most of the credit.
Although the original 170 model had plain and simple styling, it was what lay underneath that caused such a stir. At a time when all its competitors were running around with strictly conventional chassis, with beam front and rear axles and leaf springs, the 170 appeared with independent front and rear suspension, with swinging half-axles and coil springs at the rear. The new layout quite transformed the handling and, by the way, laid down a marker for all Mercedes-Benz road cars that would be built in the next four decades.
Nor was that all, for the new car also had hydraulic brakes, central chassis lubrication, and other modern details that made the company’s rivals sit up and take notice. Maybe the 170 wasn’t at all fast – with 32 horsepower from an L-head 1.7-liter 6-cylinder engine, it struggled to reach 55 mph – but this, don’t forget, was in a Germany still without fast roads.
What followed was the period in which Daimler-Benz converted itself from a brave survivor to an industrial colossus, for during the 1930s there would not only be a flood of new models, the launch of the world’s first automotive diesel-engine cars and the emergence of the magnificent Silver Arrow racecars, but also the development of many new commercial vehicles and some of the world’s best military aircraft engines.
Cars for the ‘common folk’
Looking back, it is clear that there were some very clear heads in the boardroom driving a ruthlessly logical new-model strategy, for with one quirky exception, the bread-and-butter cars that followed the 170 were all developments of the original. It was a strategy that worked. Before the end of the decade, the company was making 30,000 cars each year – not General Motors numbers even then, of course, but a statistic that placed Mercedes-Benz at the top of the middle-market tier in Germany – producing all the right sorts of cars for the class of buyers that noted automotive historian Michael Sedgwick once called the “common folk.”
No fewer than 13,775 170s were produced, and the larger-engine 200 that followed sold 15,622. Then, in 1936, came the 170V, which had a 4-cylinder engine; the 230 sister car had a 2,228cc 6-cylinder engine. All-independent suspension remained but, most importantly, a new chassis frame was now made of oval-profile tubes. Even though the style was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, this might explain why 74,964 prewar 170Vs and 24,500 230s were produced from 1936 onward. All of this also might explain that while the glamour might have been confined to the grandiloquent 540Ks and 770 Grossers, it was the humble (by Mercedes-Benz standards) family cars that set the cash registers ringing.
Maybe Daimler-Benz was not the first, but it was certainly expert at producing a whole lineup of 170Vs on the versatile basis of one rugged chassis. Most of the cars built at Sindelfingen were four-door sedans, but there were also two-door coupes, a four-door convertible called the Cabriolet Saloon, two different types of smart cabriolets and a sporty roadster. Not only that, but the more powerful 200 and 230 types shared many components with the 170V, and there would also be delivery vehicles, military staff cars of various types, and the diesel-engine derivatives, too.
There were, of course, two other major technical innovations that gave the automotive press a lot to talk about in the 1930s – achievements in which to take pride at a time when the world’s economy was in flux. The Depression was not as severe in Europe as it was in the United States, but the effects were just as far reaching. One innovation was industrially significant – the diesel-engine 260D introduced in 1936 – but it was the experimentation with rear- and rear-mid-engines that caused so many tongues everywhere to wag.
Mercedes-Benz had been dabbling with diesel engines for some years (in tractors from 1922, and originally considered producing a 3.8-liter diesel motor for cars in the old-fashioned Mannheim pedigree, but gave up when it proved to be too rough-and-ready), then bravely launched the 260D model in 1936, this using the same basic chassis as the new-type 230/320 gasoline-powered models. The briefest study of specifications – a 2,545cc 4-cylinder engine with only 45 horsepower, capable of a top speed of only 60 mph – suggested that it would be a failure, but in fact it sold steadily until 1940. After the war, there would be other diesels with improved technologies, making Mercedes-Benz the leader in this technology for passenger cars.
Soon after joining the company, Porsche had proposed the production of rear-engine automobiles, but this had been sidelined until taken up by Nibel’s team in the early 1930s. The first “people’s car,” aimed at a portion of the market in which Mercedes-Benz had never competed, was produced in 1933. With an ugly-duckling appearance, disappointing performance and unnerving tail-happy handling, it was a failure. But the company wasn’t going to give up, so the car was taken through several improvements. It even produced a roadster variant with the engine moved forward ahead of the rear wheels, but all was in vain. Mercedes abandoned the experiment in 1938, though, as we know, Volkswagen revived the design after the war under Porsche’s oversight.
By 1938, of course, Daimler-Benz was in an extremely strong position in Germany (and increasingly in the world), for in a year when the German motor industry produced 289,000 cars, one in 10 proudly bore the three-pointed star on its nose. If Götterdämmerung – societal collapse – had not been wrought on the world with the Third Reich’s geopolitical ambitions, what more might Daimler-Benz have achieved in the early 1940s?
Phoenix from the ashes
In 1945, the company had to start over again and return to the high standards it had set in the prosperous ’30s. This despite the combined air forces of the Allies having almost totally razed Stuttgart in 1944 – 70 percent of Untertürkheim’s downtown plant and 85 percent of the vast Sindelfingen factory in the suburbs were flattened.
Once again, this was not the time for trying to build prestige machines, but for offering a value-for-the-money Mercedes-Benz. Where better, therefore, than to start again as the company had in 1931: revive the range from the bottom and work upward. There was no question of trying to produce the 540K or even the 320 from the 1936-1939 pedigree, but what about producing a Mercedes for the common person, for which there would surely be a big queue?
Somehow – and quite miraculously, considering the devastation that had taken place – the tooling facilities needed to produce the 170V were found, rescued, refurbished, relocated and set to work once again, the result being that the very first postwar 170Vs (originally delivery vans, pick-up trucks and ambulances) were already being delivered in 1946. Before long, the first private cars followed, gasoline and diesel engines became available, along with several different Sindelfingen-produced body styles.
Then – and looking back, following a similar chain of events from the early 1930s – the success of that car led to better, more powerful and faster derivatives, in this case the 170S and 220 models. By the early 1950s, what had seemed like a moribund concern had rebuilt itself, its factories and its clientele. The seminally new Ponton did not replace the 170V range – so proudly and so obviously descended from the 170 of 1931 – until the year 1953. This had indeed been a remarkable rebirth.