Mercedes Benz Museum

An Orangeville friend of mine paid a visit this past weekend. Warren is living in England for a couple of years and there are many quick and easy ways to get between London and Stuttgart. Since Warren is a guy who enjoys a nice looking car, I thought it would be a good opportunity to go and see the brand new Mercedes-Benz Museum. This was just finished last year and has a lot of good press about how nice the exhibits are. I will have to say, it was one of my most enjoyable museum visits, and I am a BMW lover.

The building itself is already quite impressive looking. We had wonderful weather, blue sky and 23 degrees...
The museum is arranged to lead you through the history of the automobile, and also show some context of what was going on in the world around it. The first things displayed are the earliest motors and some of their uses. Here is one on a motorized bicycle. They did not call it a motorcycle, but I am not sure why.
Then there were some old cars and the blah blah about how Daimler and Benz invented the car. After a floor or two, they finally get to a question I had wondered... where did the name "Mercedes" come from. Well, it seems that some Emil Jellinek, a board member of the Daimler company, designed a "modern" car, specifying that it must be named after his daughter, Mercedes. This new car was a big hit, won lots of races and was loved all over the European motoring scene.

After two years of great success, the company decided to brand all cars with the Mercedes name.

Here is the first one.
I thought some of these cars were pretty amazing. Despite the antique look of this one, it could apparently do 160km/h. Of course, there were only dirt roads at this time, so I don't think I would have liked to try driving it that fast.
I think that is enough of a car history for today. Overall, I found the museum very interesting, so there will certainly be some more of my wonderful photos appearing in the next days.

I also think that the photos I took mostly turned out pretty well, I was just using my little pocket camera. I am more convinced that it was a good purchase to replace the Liam-destroyed HP camera. I can fully recommend it to anyone in the market for a cheap digital camera. The Canon 720is.