Hi guys, I’m Shmee.
Hello and welcome back to the
official Mercedes-Benz YouTube channel.
Well, today we’re at the Mercedes-
Benz Museum.
I’m going to see if we can go for a
private tour.
Hi, Michael. How are you?
Good evening, Shmee.
You know, you can’t park your car
there.
Don’t you think it fits in? I think it
looks pretty good.
I think obviously you have a point
there. It fits in really good with
the rest of us.
So what about it? Can we go have a look around?
Obviously, it’s Monday, as you know,
all the museums are closed, so I
don’t think I can make that happen.
Oh, come on. We made an exception
taking the SLS Black Series out.
What about it? I think we should go
and have a look.
I think I can’t say no to you like
two times in a row.
So one exception,
I know you know as much about cars
as I do. So I’m going to tell you,
like give you a kind of a secret
tour about five facts about
Mercedes-Benz you probably don’t
know yet.
Well, that sounds pretty good to me.
Let’s go and have a look.
And you guys can come along as well
in VR180 to explore around the museum.
So you obviously know this one,
right?
The first car in the world:
Benz Patent-Motorwagen.
Right. Carl Benz built that in
1886. But what you
probably don’t know, even one year
earlier, Gottlieb Daimler worked
on the very first small combustion
engine and he needed a vehicle to
test it in.
So he built that contraption as
a test mule for his engine.
And it has two wheels, so that
makes it per definition the first
motorbike in the world from Gottlieb
Daimler.
Wow, first motorbike as well.
How powerful is it?
How quick is it?
It has amazingly 0.5
horsepower and that
brings it up to speed and it does 12 km/h.
That’s not all too bad.
Looks a bit uncomfortable though.
Yeah, it does. Like it has no suspension
to speak of and the exhaust is right
under your seat.
So it gets, let’s say, a bit hot
after a few miles.
But not that bad for 1885.
Not bad at all.
Coming up to hidden fact
number two: What are we looking at?
Is that the boxer engine?
It is a boxer engine.
Carl Benz invented it
in 1899.
He called it the opposed piston
engine.
That’s a two cylinder opposed piston
engine developing like five
horsepower.
And we also fitted that in a car.
You can see it over there. And we
fitted it in the back of the
car.
For fact number
three, I know you’re quite familiar
with the 300 SL, aren’t you?
Indeed. I’ve been lucky enough to
spend, well, 1,000 miles driving in
one of your unbelievably special 300 SL on the
Mille Miglia.
And I’ve seen you getting in and out
a car a lot. But do you know the
reason why we constructed the doors
like that?
I mean, isn’t it just because they
are so incredibly cool?
It is.
But that was actually just an
afterthought, because underneath
this beautiful skin is a
space frame.
And we choose that one because it
only weighs 50 kilos and
is very rigid.
But for the reason that the car
doesn’t fold in half, it has to be...
the sills have to be really
big. So these doors actually were
an afterthought to the space frame
because we couldn’t fit conventional
doors.
So it’s as
simple as the fact that a normal door
didn’t fit and you ended up with those.
Yeah. Best-looking afterthought
there is.
That’s for sure.
I didn’t know that. Did you guys?
Coming up to fact
number four, do you know that we’re
actually celebrating 40 years of
G-Class this year?
That’s quite good fun.
Fact four: four decades of the G.
Yeah. What a coincidence.
And hidden underneath
all this mud is the hidden fact
that some parts never changed
through all the production cycles,
for example, like this door handle.
Well I’m lucky
enough to own a Geländewagen, a G
63. So I did actually know
that. But I don’t think mine is ever
going to be quite as dirty as that
one. But also the indicators are
the same as well.
We’ve gone all the way then from the 1886
Benz Patent-Motorwagen to this.
This is our newest exhibit.
It’s the 2019 Vision Simplex. It’s from our Chief Design Officer Gorden
Wagener and it’s based on
a Mercedes-Benz Simplex from the early 1900s.
Well, I tell you what, to go all
the way through 133 years of history
has been quite a long walk.
It has.
Like starting in 1886 it takes you
around five kilometres
to walk one whole time throughout
the whole museum.
And that’s hidden fact number five.
Fact number five: five
kilometres of walking.
Yeah, fits perfectly, right?
And at the end of these five
kilometres, it is what seems
to be our new exhibit.
But I think, I don’t think it’s a
permanent one, right?
No.
If you’ll allow me, I think I’m gonna
be taking that back away with me, if that’s okay.
I think I allow it. And while you’re
doing that, I’m going to go back to my desk.
It was a pleasure having you here,
man. I hope you enjoyed it.
Absolutely. Thank you very much for
the tour. Thank you for the opportunity.
See you next time, I would say.
Definitely.
Have a good one.
Bye!
Hope you’ve all enjoyed. Cheers!