Where Benzes are Built – Part VI: Rastatt, Germany | MBCA

Graham Robson

The Rastatt plant in Germany is currently the most modern of Mercedes-Benz’s domestic assembly facilities. Rastatt, 56 miles west of corporate headquarters in Stuttgart, was set up in a region that had previously made railway coaches and tramcars, but had never before manufactured automobiles. Today, this busy Mercedes-Benz facility produces 330,000 cars each year

Where Benzes are Built Part VI: Rastatt

The history of the automobile factories of Mercedes-Benz

Article: Graham Robson

Images: Daimler Global Media

The Rastatt plant in Germany is currently the most modern of Mercedes-Benz’s domestic assembly facilities – but just barely “domestic.” If you could stand on the roof of one of the vast buildings and look west, you would see the bustling waterway of the River Rhine, just five kilometers away; on the other side of the water is France. Site Manager Thomas Geier, however, insists that this is purely coincidental.

“In addition to this location in Germany, we considered sites in France, Great Britain and the Czech Republic, made our choice, started building operations in 1990, and completed the original plant in 1992,” Geier said.

Rastatt, 56 miles west of corporate headquarters in Stuttgart, was set up in a region that had previously made railway coaches and tramcars, but had never before manufactured automobiles. Today, this busy Mercedes-Benz facility produces 330,000 cars each year. These are all preordered and mainly consist of the very latest A-Class hatchbacks, as well as B-Class and GLA models. Next summer, production of the new A-Class sedan will be added to the Rastatt product range. That magical phrase, “electric cars,” is also becoming more important, for not only did the B-Class Electric Drive model go on sale in 2014, EQ models are due to start production at Rastatt in the future.

A recent tour of the plant was fascinating; not only is it very modern, well equipped and busy, it is also extremely adaptable. From 1992 to 1996, it was effectively broken in by assembling E-Class models – from body shells made at Sindelfingen – followed by six months of reconfiguring the assembly lines to allow the brand-new A-Class hatchback to take up residence.

In 1992, there were already 1,700 employees, but by the time Rastatt celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2017, the workforce had grown to 6,500; it’s still growing. Plant manager Geier pointed out that more than 50 nationalities now work in the factory, and that includes more than 500 people from Alsace on the other side of the Rhine in France. To accommodate employment figures like that, a three-shift system is in operation.

The factory site covers 370 acres – previously totally undeveloped – and features two separate body-in-white production buildings. For those of us privileged to take the factory tour, not only was there quite a lot of walking along elevated viewing platforms, but even a full-size bus – built by Mercedes-Benz, naturally – to drive us from location to location.

The surprise for me was to discover what is made and, equally interesting, not made on site. Engines come from Kölleda; transmissions from Untertürkheim, or Sebes in Romania. Body pressings come from nearby Kuppenheim, which also supplies four other plants. Part of the Rastatt site also includes a large industrial park; production facilities are owned by independent companies supplying vital components for bustling Mercedes-Benz production lines that may be only hundreds of feet away.

And a production line is a production line, is a production line, right? Perhaps, but this has to be one of the most flexible I've ever seen, for GLAs follow A- and B-Class vehicles all in the same stream. The sheer number of robots was impressive; they not only politely offered up fully assembled dash panels to be installed, but also orchestrated the crucial marriage in which an engine and transmission sat on the line awaiting the descent of a body shell from above before the gentle forward motion of the assembly line begins again.

In addition, a troupe of balletic robots presented fully painted, assembled and glazed doors to be fitted to body shells moving along the lines. I saw one deftly programmed robot delicately place windshield glass on a fixture, carefully apply a judicious amount of adhesive, then smoothly stick the glass onto a newly arrived body shell. No humans involved, no chance of a mistake being made – and no boredom, either.

Even so, human beings were everywhere in evidence, but it was clear that it was really their brains, rather than their muscles, that were needed at all points. Not that they had to make any decisions as to which parts fit which bodies, or which optional extras were to be installed: Somewhere in the massive plant, computers have already taken care of all that. Attached to the rear quarter panel of each body shell was an equipment-specification label to be regularly scanned by sensors – and obeyed.

What would happen if that label were damaged or displaced? The answer was a rather world-weary response, making it clear that in more than 20 years, such a thing had not yet happened.

This, though, was not a soulless operation from which people – customers, they are called, and Mercedes-Benz is very welcoming to them – are proscribed. A feature of our arrival was that we moved close to the Customer Center, where cars were being delivered individually to clients who had come from far and wide to collect them. Nor were these all-compact models, for we saw several C- and E-Class machines being handed over. Every day, up to 200 cars get this loving treatment. And just to emphasize that there is still a little fun left in this highly automated and efficient world, the restaurant in the Customer Center is known as “Bertha’s” – the given name, of course, of Frau Benz, the founder’s wife way back in the 1880s.

It was an absorbing visit to an impressive and modern Mercedes-Benz production facility. My guides clearly saw that I enjoyed it – in fact, as I left they urged me to make plans to visit the Hungarian, or the Finnish plant next.

Speaking with Thomas Geier

Thomas Geier, Rastatt site manager, is a manufacturing expert with a mechanical engineering degree from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Geier began his career at Mercedes-Benz in 1985, working first in transmission design. He managed the Mercedes-Benz plant at Kecskemét in Hungary before switching to the Rastatt core team in 1991; he became plant manager in 2017.

The Star: Who makes what, and where?

Rastatt is the most significant of the corporation’s A-Class manufacturing facilities, though there are five other plants: Beijing, China; Valmet Automotive in Uuusikaupunki, Finland; Hambach in France; Kecskemét, Hungary; and Aguascalientes in Mexico. Rastatt is the lead facility for compact-car production. This means that changes made at Rastatt in the software that controls all the assembly-line operations and procedures are automatically echoed in the software that controls the other production plants.

Mercedes-Benz and Smart produce a combined total of 2.4 million cars of all types each year. The Chinese plant alone builds 450,000 cars each year; Hambach is the center of Smart car production while the Mexican facility is shared with the Renault-Nissan Alliance. Since September 2018, the Mexican plant has built A-Class sedan models for delivery to the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe.

Time Line

1990: Factory construction starts

1992: E-Class production starts

1996: E-Class assembly ends

1997: New-generation A-Class production starts

2004: Second-generation A-Class production starts

2005: Original B-Class launched

2011: Second-generation B-Class

2012: Third-generation A-Class launched

2013: New GLA model launched

2018: Current-generation A- and B-Class replace previous generations.

More than 4 million cars have now been assembled at Rastatt