100 years ago Benz took the first drive

Press, 10 February 1986, Page 36

100 years ago Benz took the first drive

NZPA-Reuter Stuttgart On January 29, 1886, Karl Benz, of Karlsruhe, Germany took out a patent that opened up an era: his invention looked like a tricycle and sputtered along at barely 15km but it went down in history as the world’s first motor-car.

Less than a 100 km south, in a suburb of Stuttgart, Gottfried Daimler, who the year before had invented the first motorcycle, was working round the clock on his own motor vehicle. One of Daimler’s customers, an Austrian businessman living in Nice, named his car after his daughter, Mercedes. Daimler adopted the name Mercedes for all his vehicles and introduced the now-famous threepoint star emblem; Gottfried Daimler and Karl Benz never met, but between them, they

founded an industrial group that today is the most powerful in West Germany. Daimler and Benz have come a long way since the early 1900 s when, because of poor salesmanship, they were nearly driven out of business by French competitors. In 1905, Benz had to call on a French engineer, Marius Barbarou, to keep his firm from financial failure. In succeeding decades the Mercedes and its emblem became a symbol of power and success adopted by people as diverse as Adolf Hitler, Fidel Castro, Pope JohnPaul 11, Andrei Gromyko, Elvis Presley, and Sophia Loren, to name but a few. Daimler-Benz is also the world's biggest producer of trucks. It accounts for more than 12 per cent of the international market for heavy Vehicles.

In the run-up to the centenary Daimler-Benz broke all its production and sales records in 1985. For the first time last year, 540,000 Mercedes were built, up 13 per cent. In addition, the company produced 220,000 trucks. , After-tax profits are expected to reach a record 1.6 billion marks. Last year, Daimler-Benz also bought up three companies outside the vehicle industry: the aircraft engine firm, M.T.U., Dornier, the No. 2 West German aircraft firm, and the electrical firm, AEG.