Where Benzes are Built – Part IV: Mannheim
The history of the automobile factories of Mercedes-Benz
Article Graham Robson Images Daimler Archives
Previous installments in this series on the automobile factories of Mercedes-Benz have concentrated on the plants that manufacture the latest automobiles – or at least major components for those vehicles. This time, however, I must focus on a German location that produced its last private car in the early 1930s – more than 80 years ago. Even so, this is a historic story, for that factory was located in Mannheim – where the Benz business was set up, prospered and became Daimler’s biggest rival in the early days of the motorcar – and was responsible for designing the world’s very first automobile.
In the beginning
The story, of course, started back in the 1880s when a struggling engineer, Carl Benz, began making a few two-stroke gas-powered stationary engines. Work on the first petrol-powered “horseless carriage” began in 1883-1884, and the world’s first such machine, a tricycle with an engine behind and below the seats, first tottered into action in the streets of Mannheim, which was a long-established city straddling the River Rhine, about 80 miles northwest of Stuttgart.
Before long, Benz – helped by a handful of brave business associates – decided to put this machine on the market; by the end of the 1880s, the first models had been sold and were even seen at shows outside Germany. By that time, Gottlieb Daimler, who would become a major competitor for the next 40 years – but not a partner – had also struggled to put his company into existence. It was these two brands that would dominate the motoring headlines in Germany for years to come.
Early success
Although Benz and his sparsely equipped factory in Mannheim soon began to prosper, it was originally with the production of gasoline-powered stationary engines; after 1893, when more than 500 such power units had been produced in a single year, he was able to build a growing number of the four-wheeled Benz Victoria cars. By modern standards, of course, such machines looked unashamedly spindly and had only a 3-horsepower engine, but the wealthy took to them. From 1894, the smaller and lighter Benz Velo joined the Victoria; in that year, no fewer than 134 Benz cars left the factory gates in Mannheim, 49 of them exported to France.
Those were the days when Benz was outselling Daimler (more than 600 Benz cars were produced in 1900, by which time more than 3,000 Benz cars had rolled out of the gates in Mannheim) and the company was already building its first trucks. To give an idea of the expansion involved, the original factory had covered 4,800 square yards; by 1900 it covered approximately 36,000 square yards. How big is that? Well, consider that an American football field is about 7,000 square yards. A much-modernized plant was inaugurated in 1908. It was not until the mercurial Emil Jellinek (see The Star, November-December 2017) conceived the Mercedes brand that this balance was upset.
Mercedes steals a march
From the early 1900s, Mercedes cars from Daimler began to look lower, sleeker, faster and more sporting, while Benz carried on making stolid and somehow bulkier products. The Mercedes, for example, swiftly adopted the now-traditional front-engine, rear-drive chassis layout, while Benz persisted with its rear-engine installation, which retained belt drive.
Unhappily for Benz, the new Mercedes cars made such an impact that demand at Benz slumped alarmingly, and the company’s Mannheim plant began to look distinctly half empty and underemployed. Only 172 cars were built in 1903. In the same period, a new shaft-drive model, the Parsifal, was a marketing failure; Benz and his son Eugen had a monumental disagreement with their fellow directors and even withdrew for a time from the company they had founded.
Salvation at Mannheim came in 1904 when the Benz family returned, regaining control of the company’s technical strategy, grafted a new 4-cylinder engine onto the Parsifal chassis, and were delighted to see that demand increased significantly. It was no coincidence that an engineer named Hans Nibel (who would later become one of the most famous Mercedes-Benz personalities) joined the company at this time, and became chief engineer just four years later.
Benz bounces back
Hence, Benz & Cie. returned to financial stability. The Mannheim factory filled up again and Nibel’s technical influence became more and more marked, so much so that in 1906, when Carl Benz resigned from the company that he founded more than two decades earlier, it did not cause a great upset. From then on, with Benz on a similar technical path as Mercedes – and the factory being the largest local employer in Mannheim – the two brands settled down to fight each other, face to face, until the mid-1920s.
It proved to be a stimulating battle between what turned out to be rivals of near-equal strength. Interestingly, although Benz had adopted shaft drive for its transmission as early as 1902, Daimler was more reluctant with the Mercedes cars, but finally began to change over to shaft drive in 1908. However, to confuse the issue and blur the trends, Benz then moved back to using chain final drive on its GP and Blitzen models in the next few years.
It was Nibel who ensured that the full range of Benz cars on offer became more and more powerful. Benz, like Mercedes, had concluded that success in motorsport was good for the company’s image. Benz entered a pair of 150-brake-horsepower-engined cars in the 1908 Grand Prix in France, where the machines took second and third place overall. Then came the magnificent Blitzen Benz (with its 200-brake horsepower, 1,312-CID engine), which would hold the world’s land-speed record from 1909 to 1924.
Benz developed a comprehensive range of road cars – the Nibel-inspired generation much more modern in appearance than the vehicles that they replaced – and between 1908 and 1914, when the World War broke out, no fewer than 23 new 4-cylinder and two 6-cylinder models were listed.
War and peace
During the war, the Benz plant at Mannheim – much like its rival Daimler in Stuttgart – designed and built aircraft engines. Because the reign of the long-distance bomber had yet to begin, the factory suffered no damage from overflying enemy aircraft.
Although Germany’s factories and infrastructure still stood after the armistice, the country’s economy was in ruins. The financial burden imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 meant that massive reparations had to be paid to the victorious nations – principally the United States, Great Britain and France. The predictable and unfortunate result was hyperinflation, making it almost impossible for concerns such as Benz to survive.
Faced with the stark reality of a national economy that was short on financial reserves and raw materials – particularly rubber – Benz struggled to keep Mannheim busy. This was never going to be easy after military contract work vanished.
Experimental work and small-scale production on industrial diesel engines was one thing, as was the brave but eventually fruitless dabble with mid-engined Rumpler racing cars, but it was with conventional machines such as the 27/70, 16/50 and 10/40 road cars that kept Benz perilously afloat.
Merger and aftermath
Neither Benz nor Daimler could continue to survive in this febrile market. As I concluded in an earlier historical survey of this period: It had seemed inevitable for some years that Daimler and Benz would eventually have to come together, or that their continued competition for sales would eventually result in one of them being forced out of business. If the German economy had been stable in the early 1920s, the day of decision might have been postponed for a while, but the whirlwind of inflation, which consumed the nation in 1923, destroyed everyone’s hopes for the future.
It was a Dr. Jahr of Benz who made the original approach to Daimler about a merger. Talks and formal negotiations began in 1923, but it was not until May 1924 that the two companies signed an Agreement of Mutual Intent. For all intents and purposes, this was the first major move toward a complete merger, which allowed Daimler-Benz AG to come into existence in June 1926.
As far as the staff at Mannheim was concerned, news of the merger was both a time for rejoicing, but also one for new worries. On the one hand, the new company could immediately start to root out the model duplications that were harming the market share of both Benz and Mercedes; on the other hand, there was now the problem of harnessing and coordinating the engineering talents of Nibel at Benz and Fritz Nallinger and Ferdinand Porsche at Mercedes.
The Mannheim
It was at this time that the word Mannheim became more familiar to the buying public, for the new company elected to produce a range of conventional 6-cylinder-engine touring cars, originally with a 3.1-liter engine – the 12/55, which rejoiced in the model name of “310 Mannheim”– an uninspired title that proved the new marketing team was obviously on holiday. In many ways it was a kissing cousin of the Stuttgart model, which was to be assembled purely at Stuttgart-Untertürkheim, and which had a smaller, less powerful engine.
For a brief period, it seemed as if Mannheim might yet prove to be the dominant partner in this new enterprise, until it became clear that the exciting Porsche-designed sports cars, and limousines such as the original 770 Grosser, would be reserved for Stuttgart. That was emphasized when Porsche left the company, his place being taken by Nibel, who moved up the road from Mannheim to Stuttgart-Untertürkheim.
However, the Mannheim complex, which was still the largest employer in that city, eventually began to slide into the pecking order of Mercedes-Benz products. The first of the range to have all-independent suspension was to be built in Stuttgart, the first cars with all-steel bodies soon followed, and then there were the rear-engined 130Hs and the magnificent range of 380K/500K/540K supercars.
Mannheim, for its part, soldiered on with the 310, which was later equipped with a 3.69-liter, 225-CID engine to become the 370 Mannheim. There was even a sporting version of the latter car called the 370S, which had an overdrive transmission and could beat 70 mph – but this was the height of it. After 1934, private-car assembly at Mannheim was discontinued, leaving the factory to look after truck and bus assembly, and the manufacture of engines and other components.
War, prosperity and a new era at Mannheim
This, however, was not the beginning of the end for the Mannheim plant. Although both the USAAF and the British RAF bombers did their best to flatten the factory during WWII, they were not at all successful; much of the plant was still operational when the U.S. Seventh Army swept across the Rhine at the end of March 1945.
From 1946, the Mannheim complex became the very first Mercedes-Benz plant to restart postwar production. Confirming the vital importance of the advanced diesel, truck and bus development carried out there in the late 1930s, the factory soon became the company’s most important center of truck and bus production. Until the ultra-modern truck assembly plant at Wörth was opened in 1965, huge numbers of trucks came off the Mannheim assembly lines. To this day, Mannheim remains a key center of bus production for Mercedes-Benz.
In the last 40 years, Mannheim has also benefited from a series of large investments; it is now the center of Mercedes-Benz commercial-engine production. The company was proud to announce that the millionth commercial-vehicle diesel engine was built there in 1975, and the millionth example of the world-renowned OM500 series diesel followed as recently as 2016.
And so, it may now be more than 80 years since the last private car was assembled at the historic site of Mannheim, but we must always remember that it was the Benz and Company, just as much as the Daimler Motor Company, that was an illustrious cofounder of the Mercedes-Benz colossus.
There are those – mostly car-fixated enthusiasts – who might scoff at Mannheim and talk about “how are the mighty fallen,” but my immediate riposte would be that they should visit this still-enormous site and see just how important it still is to the entire company to this day.
The lightweight Benz Velo, built at Mannheim, 1894 to 1900.
Dignified fitters, car-assembly staff and apprentices pose solemnly at the Benz & Cie. works, Mannheim, 1897.
Heinrich, Prince of Prussia, at the wheel of his Benz 70 HP Triple-Phaeton on a royal visit to Mannheim, 1907; Carl Benz – with moustache and bowler hat – is on the far left.
Imperial German Army takes delivery of an order of Benz trucks, Mannheim, 1915.
The world’s fastest automobile: Re-created Blitzen-Benz, 1921.
A Mercedes-Benz Mannheim 350 Pullman, 1929.
Mercedes-Benz L3500 trucks come off the Mannheim assembly line 1954.
Mercedes-Benz O302 bus assembly, Mannheim, 1965.
TOP: Aerial view of the Mannheim factory complex, Europe’s largest bus plant , taken in 1999.
Contemporary Mannheim is a major center of vocational training for Mercedes-Benz.
Mannheim is now Daimler’s global center for urban-bus production.
The engine-manufacturing facility is an international benchmark for precision, efficiency and quality.