Mercedes-Benz History

Mercedes-Benz is excellence materialized. Now, the company is known among the world’s top manufacturers, when talking about cars. Everything about Mercedes-Benz is high-end, and no other car company can compare to all that Mercedes-Benz has accomplished, if you look at all the luxury cars, trucks, vans, buses, and its part in the motor car world.

Two men – Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, started Mercedes Benz during the 1880's. It was them who came up with vehicle powered by internal combustion engine. An interesting fact about these two originators is that they had no idea about each other. Their work was closely related, and they both lived in Southwest Germany, but they didn’t know each other. And this is just the beginning of Mercedes-Benz history.

According to the Mercedes-Benz history, Daimler and Benz never met at all. They worked separately, Daimler concentrating on his successful racing cars at Unterturkheim. Because Daimler’s cars were so successful, a dealer from Austria named Emil Jellinek got the cars into races and won more often than not. The cars were named after Mercedes – his daughter.

Jellinek, because he was very impressed with the cars, made a large order from Daimler and his business partner and friend Wilhelm Maybach. It was agreed that Jellinek could modify some of the designs, and that he could name the car Mercedes. Because of his great faith in the cars, a large portion of what he had went towards investing on the company.

The name change warded off legal problems, because companies overseas already bought the rights to Daimler’s name and also to his designs. Even now there are high-end Daimler cars being made and sold in England. If the named hadn’t been changed to ‘Mercedes’, there would have been a lot of things to straighten out. Good thing the change took place.

There were hopes to have American-built Mercedes factory, but the factory that used to be a piano factory got burned down, losing the prospect place of the NY Mercedes-Benz factory, and thus losing the hopes to have a branch of the world-class manufacturer in America.

At first, Daimler and Benz the originators of the luxury car weren’t in the same company. In fact, they were definitely rivals when it came to the world companies. But due to the pressure brought on by the hard times during the 1920s, the two companies had to work together, merging into one company that soon progressed into the Mercedes-Benz that you know today.