Where the Cars Come From: Part I. Sindelfingen
Article: Graham Robson
Images: Daimler Archives
Mercedes-Benz is all about Stuttgart, right? Well, yes and no. For sure, the downtown Untertürkheim plant is the original historic site, but the Sindelfingen complex – located to the southwest of the city center – is equally important. Today’s Sindelfingen plant, on which billions of dollars have been spent in recent years for modernization, is one of the busiest factories in the group, with only the Bremen factory in northwest Germany turning out more cars every year.
The town of Sindelfingen itself is about 15 miles from the city’s center. Next time you fly to the Stuttgart airport and approach from the west, be sure to look out the left side of the cabin just a few minutes before touching down; there is the city, dominated by the huge manufacturing complex.
Early years
But how did this site become the colossus that it is today? To work this out we must go back to the very foundation of the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft (DMG), which produced its first car in 1886 on small premises in Cannstadt, a suburb near Stuttgart. As it grew, the company then moved to the original premises of Untertürkheim in the center of Stuttgart, which is still the corporate headquarters of Mercedes-Benz to this day.
Daimler was enlisted by the German armed forces to produce more and more military machinery, including aircraft and aero engines, during World War I. Recognizing that it would soon run out of capacity, the company set out to expand. Having purchased a 94-acre (38 hectares) site in the nearby settlement of Sindelfingen in 1915, Daimler began making aircraft there in 1916, prospering mightily until the end of hostilities in 1918.
Between the wars
Soon thereafter, Daimler – having struggled for survival in the inflation-ravaged early 1920s – elected to concentrate all its heavy mechanical operations in Untertürkheim, including machining and final-car assembly, and focus the Sindelfingen plant on coachwork manufacturing. After the 1926 merger when the Mercedes-Benz brand came into existence, Sindelfingen became the hub for all the glamorous, limited-production automobiles that we admire so much today. Benz continued making its own cars in Mannheim in those tumultuous years, as often detailed in The Star. After the merger was formalized, the company maintained separate manufacturing facilities there for years, building derivatives of the Benz cars. It was not until the early 1930s that Mannheim’s car-making activities wound down. That factory then concentrated on building trucks and buses, and continued to do so until the 1970s.
In the 1920s and ’30s, engines, transmissions, suspension and chassis components for Mercedes-Benz automobiles were produced at the Untertürkheim plant while the bodies – increasingly assembled from pressed steel sheet, but maintaining an element of wood-based coachbuilding in their makeup – were lovingly fabricated at Sindelfingen before being trucked the few miles to downtown Untertürkheim for final assembly.
The Sindelfingen complex, therefore, can take credit for some of the magnificent Mercedes-Benz automobiles built in that period – including, of course, the sports cars inspired by Ferdinand Porsche, the massive Grosser models and the magnificent autobahn-eating 540K machines, but the expansion and modernization of the plant included the building of an ever-increasing number of steel shells for use on more plebeian cars such as the 170, 200, 230 and 170V. Perhaps the latter were neither glamorous in visual appeal nor performance, but they were built and sold in the tens of thousands, keeping the company’s cash registers ringing and making it very profitable.
Conflict and ruination
Who knows what might have happened in the 1940s and ’50s if the U.S. Army Air Force and British Royal Air Force had not played a part in what transpired next? Knowing that Sindelfingen was a production center for all types of German military machinery in the Second World War, from 1942 to the end of that horrifying conflict, the two allied forces unleashed bombers in larger and larger fleets, culminating in a series of mass raids on Stuttgart in 1943 and 1944. Stark black and white photographs document the unending devastation; this was undoubtedly a major factor behind the company directors’ bleak public assessment, announced in 1945: “… for all practical purposes, Daimler-Benz has ceased to exist.”
Then, as every amateur historian of Mercedes-Benz surely knows, the ragged and hungry workforce gradually filtered back to the ruins of former production facilities, and got down to work clearing rubble to make order out of chaos. This was perhaps more difficult at Sindelfingen than at other Mercedes-Benz manufacturing sites, for before the last all-clear had sounded and the bombing was finally over, no less than 85 percent of that once vast factory had been obliterated.
Out of the ashes
The employees of Mercedes-Benz helped the firm recover magnificently from the apocalyptic destruction. But that success was also a great credit to the American-dominated peacetime administration of Germany that followed. Every attempt was made to get the business going once again; postwar priority was given to the regeneration of Untertürkheim’s factory, but Sindelfingen came back online immediately afterward.
By sheer hard work, both management and workforce set about re-creating their factory, and after casting around to recover vital parts of production machinery that had been spirited away to safe hiding places before bombing began, a still bare but nevertheless weatherproof pair of factories assembled their very first postwar car – a 170V – in February 1946. What could be described as “series production” (in laughably small numbers when judged by late-century standards) was underway by mid-year, and the rate rose inexorably thereafter.
Postwar boom
Production, painfully slow at first, soon accelerated. As Winston Churchill once commented regarding wartime production: “At first, nothing, then a trickle, then a stream, and finally a flood. …” From zero in 1945, 214 cars were produced in 1946, then five times that many in 1947, five times that many again in 1948, three times again as many in 1949, and twice as many again in 1950; from zero to 34,000 units in five years.
A check on these production figures shows that the increase in 1949 from over 5,000 to 17,000, was when the restyled, partially engineered and modernized 170S (W136) supplanted the 170V on which it was based – and when Untertürkheim introduced its first postwar diesel-engine car – the 170D.
Basically (although like all other companies, Mercedes-Benz seems to have made exceptions), postwar final assembly of the W136 170V, based on an oval-tube chassis frame, was concentrated at Untertürkheim, though body shells for this versatile range of sturdy vehicles were manufactured at Sindelfingen. This system was also used for the magnificent 300 series that soon followed. The 300SL Gullwing, closely related to the 300 sedan, was bodied at Sindelfingen but completed at Untertürkheim. And let us not forget that the world-famous W196s and 300SLR racing machines of 1954 and 1955 were also produced – in strict secrecy – at Untertürkheim.
This was a period during which Sindelfingen considerably expanded its existing body-construction abilities, and when final assembly of complete cars – the “marriage” as it’s called, of chassis with body – began in this out-of-town location.
Sindelfingen expands
From the early 1950s, when the W120 Ponton range became the first unibody Mercedes-Benz, these cars were all built entirely on newly constructed assembly lines at Sindelfingen. Thereafter, the company’s archived photographs present evidence that – car after car, model after model, major event after major event – all took place in those vast and brightly lit halls. Although building of the 100,000th type W136 170S and assembly of the 1,000th 300SL Gullwing were celebrated at Untertürkheim, thereafter the spotlight swung decisively to the Sindelfingen complex.
It was inevitable that this should be so, as this writer discovered back in 1959 when, as a young man, he was awarded the privilege of touring the Untertürkheim facility. The plant was fully modernized and already nearly full of machinery engaged in the activity of producing engines, transmissions and other components for the company’s entire range.
The massive Sindelfingen complex, on the other hand, seemed to be forever expanding, changing, reinventing itself and welcoming more and different vehicle types; from the mid- to late-1950s, each and every one of the current private-car ranges was manufactured there. On a visit to Germany in the late 1960s, 10 years after his first postwar visit, this writer recalls being ferried around Sindelfingen’s massive premises in a tourist bus that, at one moment, would stop to allow the huge bulk of a body shell for a six-door 600 Pullman to cross from one building to another, then moments later expertly dodge a smartly driven 280SL Pagoda making its way out to the gates.
Unquenchable demand
This decade, perhaps more than any in the firm’s history, marked the transition of the company from the maker of a limited number of expensive cars to a producer of substantial numbers of smaller cars. Although these smaller vehicles were less expensive, they were nonetheless technically advanced, safe, and beautifully built and equipped. In response to a seemingly unending appetite, cars for the general consumer market dominated. To stand at the end of one of those mile-long assembly lines was enough to make one wonder just where the demand for such cars could possibly be coming from.
The company built its 2 millionth private car in 1970 – a 220D – and Mercedes-Benz was on track to make about 300,000 cars in that year alone, all of them produced at Sindelfingen. Even so, the halls were beginning to look rather full with what cynics called “Stuttgart taxis,” as well as the less numerous but desirable S-Class, many 280SLs and the occasional, rare 600.
When the 5 millionth car – a 350SL – was built in October 1977, the company made an astonishing announcement about Sindelfingen: The first million cars had taken 16 years to build; the second million took six; third million, four years; the fourth million took three years; and the fifth million – just two years.
Reaching the limit
By the early 1980s, however, the limit had been reached. Although the company had always wanted to build the new smaller W201 saloon in its modern factory at Bremen, this project had to await building-plan approval; for the first year or so, more than 100,000 units of this new car were built at Sindelfingen. Once the manufacturing tools (including body press, assembly jigs and everything connected with producing this best-selling new car) had moved to Bremen, the firm then settled down to make the Sindelfingen plant home to the cars we now call the E-Class, the E-class-derivative CLS and the most-luxurious S-Class, a strategy that persists to this day.
By this time, you too could visit Sindelfingen and observe the high-tech engineering and assembly facilities – but not just by showing up at the front gate for a tour. The ideal alternative was to order a new car through a Mercedes-Benz dealer and arrange for delivery in person from the Customer Collection Center inside the plant. This very popular system was set up in 1981 and soon duplicated at Bremen and elsewhere.
What of the future?
Although Sindelfingen’s future seems assured, it has now reached capacity on the number of cars it can produce. There are several big assembly plants in Germany, France and Austria, and many more secondary assembly facilities have been set up around the world, many of them using major components shipped from Sindelfingen and Untertürkheim. And as long as we still want to purchase cars from our favorite brand, the expansion of Mercedes-Benz production around the world can be expected to continue.
How Many Factories and Where?
Daimler AG is a true international manufacturing giant. According to the firm’s 2016 annual report, the company has more than 60 production sites (not including licensing agreements) to build cars, vans, trucks, buses and components for Mercedes-Benz and other Daimler brands, including smart, Freightliner, Western Star, BharatBenz, FUSO, Setra, and Thomas. Plants operate in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Romania, Russia, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and Vietnam.
Sanding down a fender, 1936.
Making the stars shine, 1956.
A 170S in the paint booth, 1950.
The 100,000th 180 Diesel rolls off the assembly line, 1958.
A final polish at the end of the assembly line, 1966.
Loading up finished automobiles in front of the new painting hall, 1963.