The Hairpin and the Horsepower: Looking Back at Mercedes-Benz’ journey.
In August 1888, when the fuel line of a Benz Patent-Motorwagen became blocked somewhere between Mannheim and Pforzheim, Bertha Benz did not have a mechanic, a toolkit or even a precedent to follow. She had a hairpin.
She used it to clear the obstruction and continued driving.
The repair was one of several improvised solutions during what became the world’s first long-distance journey by automobile. Bertha had set out with her sons Eugen and Richard without telling her husband, Karl Benz. Her destination was Pforzheim, nearly 100 kilometres from Mannheim. By the time she arrived, she had done more than complete an audacious family journey. She had demonstrated that the automobile could leave the workshop and function in the real world.
That journey feels particularly apt in 2026. Mercedes-Benz is marking 140 years since Karl Benz applied for the patent for his three-wheeled motor car on 29 January 1886. The anniversary is less a look backwards than an opportunity to examine an unusual legacy, one shaped by invention, competition, safety, design and the persistent belief that the car is never quite finished.
Two Inventors, 130 Kilometres Apart
The automobile has an unusually neat origin story because two versions emerged almost simultaneously.
In Mannheim, Karl Benz was developing a vehicle conceived from the outset as a motor car. His patent DRP 37435, filed on 29 January 1886, is widely regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile and now forms part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
About 130 kilometres away, Gottlieb Daimler was working with Wilhelm Maybach on a high-speed combustion engine. In 1886, Daimler installed it in a carriage, creating the first four-wheeled automobile. Benz and Daimler worked independently and, despite their proximity, never met personally.
Their businesses would converge four decades later. Benz & Cie. and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft merged in 1926 to form Daimler-Benz AG, with the company’s cars carrying the Mercedes-Benz name.
There is something fitting about that dual beginning. The automobile did not emerge from a single flash of inspiration. It came from engineers solving similar problems in different workshops, followed by a woman who took one of those inventions onto the road and exposed all the problems that remained.
Innovation, from the beginning, was practical.
When Luxury Began to Mean Safety Too
The romance of automotive history tends to favour speed, beautiful silhouettes and racing victories. Yet some of Mercedes-Benz’s most consequential work has been considerably less glamorous.
In 1959, the Mercedes-Benz 111 series “Fintail” became the first production model to use the safety body developed by engineer Béla Barényi. Its structure combined deformable zones at the front and rear with a more rigid passenger cell, allowing crash energy to be absorbed in a controlled way. The principle became fundamental to modern passive vehicle safety.
The following decades brought a succession of technologies that now feel ordinary precisely because they became so widely adopted.
In 1978, the first digital electronically controlled anti-lock braking system, developed with Bosch, made its world premiere in the Mercedes-Benz S-Class. The driver airbag followed in a production S-Class in 1981, paired with a seat belt tensioner for the front passenger. In 1995, the Electronic Stability Programme debuted in the S-Class 140 series, designed to help prevent a vehicle from skidding in critical situations.
These developments altered the idea of automotive luxury. Comfort and craftsmanship remained important, but engineering increasingly had to make occupants feel protected as well as indulged.
The S-Class would repeatedly become the place where that philosophy appeared first. Not every Mercedes-Benz safety innovation debuted there, but ABS, the production driver airbag and ESP all did.
Mercedes-Benz: The Cars That Became Cultural Objects
Engineering alone does not explain why certain cars move beyond transport and enter design history.
The Mercedes-Benz 300 SL is one of them. Introduced in 1954, its famous roof-hinged doors were a consequence of its racing-derived structure, but they gave the car a silhouette that would become instantly recognisable. In 1999, an international jury of experts voted the 300 SL “Sports Car of the Century”.
Its importance lies partly in that overlap between necessity and beauty. The Gullwing doors were not conceived merely as theatre. A technical solution became the car’s defining visual signature.
Decades later, another Mercedes-Benz would demonstrate how dramatically automotive provenance can affect value.
In May 2022, one of only two Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé prototypes sold for €135 million at an auction held at the Mercedes-Benz Museum. Mercedes-Benz described it as a world record for an automobile. Proceeds from the sale provided seed capital for beVisioneers: The Mercedes-Benz Fellowship.
The figures are extraordinary, but the appeal of such cars is not solely financial. They are objects in which engineering, design, competition and cultural memory have become inseparable.
For luxury collectors, that is often where rarity acquires its greatest significance. The object matters, but so does the story it carries.
140 Years, Then Another S-Class Mercedes-Benz Model
Mercedes-Benz chose 29 January 2026 for the world premiere of its extensively updated S-Class, exactly 140 years after Carl Benz filed his original patent.
The symbolism is deliberate, but the scale of what follows is more revealing. Mercedes-Benz says more than 40 new models will make their debut over the next two years as part of the largest product launch programme in the company’s history.
Ola Källenius, Chairman of the Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, describes the company’s position as one shaped by its role in automotive history. “As the inventor of the automobile, Mercedes-Benz holds a truly unique position in automotive history,” he says.
Yet heritage presents an interesting challenge for a luxury marque. The more recognisable the past becomes, the easier it is to depend on it.
Mercedes-Benz appears aware of the tension. Its 2026 anniversary programme connects historic models and familiar design codes with electric mobility, software and increasingly automated driving. The new S-Class itself is being used for a transcontinental journey covering more than 50,000 kilometres across six continents and 140 locations.
The anniversary, then, is not really about preserving 1886. It is about asking what the instinct that produced the first automobile looks like when the automobile already exists.
From Solar Paint to Brain-Inspired Computing
Some of the answers currently sit in the research laboratory rather than the showroom.
Mercedes-Benz is exploring a solar coating intended to generate energy from a vehicle’s body surface, potentially reducing the frequency of charging stops. It is also researching neuromorphic computing, a form of computing inspired by the way the human brain functions. The company says the technology has the potential to reduce the energy needed for data processing in autonomous driving by as much as 90 per cent compared with today’s systems. These remain research concepts rather than current production features.
Materials are being reconsidered too. Research includes biotechnologically produced spider silk and leather alternatives derived from recycled plastic, placing questions of tactility and luxury alongside those of resource use.
Elsewhere, Mercedes-Benz is investigating an In-Drive Brake integrated within the electric motor and transmission unit, as well as augmented and mixed reality for increasingly personalised vehicle experiences.
Some ideas will reach production. Others may not.
That uncertainty is part of the point. Innovation rarely arrives with the benefit of hindsight. In 1886, an automobile itself was an unproven proposition. Two years later, Bertha Benz was still buying fuel from a pharmacy and solving mechanical failures at the roadside.
The Hairpin Still Matters
It would be easy to tell 140 years of Mercedes-Benz history through horsepower, luxury saloons and record-setting cars. The more interesting thread may be problem-solving.
Carl Benz had to imagine transport without a horse. Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach approached the same possibility from a different direction. Béla Barényi asked what a car body should do during a collision rather than merely how strong it could be. Later engineers reconsidered braking, airbags, stability and software.
And Bertha Benz encountered a blocked fuel line and reached for what she had.
The technologies have become vastly more complicated. The instinct has not.
A century and four decades after the automobile began, perhaps the most useful part of its history is not the certainty that Mercedes-Benz already knows where motoring is going. It is the reminder that progress has usually begun when somebody encountered a problem for which no established answer yet existed, found one anyway, and kept moving.
140 Years at a Glance
- 29 January 1886: Carl Benz applies for the patent for his three-wheeled motor car.
- 1886: Gottlieb Daimler installs the engine developed with Wilhelm Maybach in a carriage, creating the first four-wheeled automobile.
- 1888: Bertha Benz completes the first long-distance automobile journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim.
- 1926: Benz & Cie. and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft merge to form Daimler-Benz AG.
- 1954: The Mercedes-Benz 300 SL makes its debut. It is later voted “Sports Car of the Century” in 1999.
- 1959: The safety body with defined crumple zones debuts in the Mercedes-Benz 111 series.
- 1978: Digital electronically controlled ABS premieres in the S-Class.
- 1981: The driver airbag makes its production-car world premiere in the S-Class.
- 1995: Electronic Stability Programme debuts in the S-Class 140 series.
- 2022: A Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé sells for €135 million.
- 29 January 2026: The extensively updated S-Class premieres as Mercedes-Benz marks 140 years of the automobile.
- 2026 onwards: More than 40 Mercedes-Benz models are planned to debut across a two-year product programme.
Also read: Fort Jadhavgadh: Inside Pune’s Historic Wedding Destination
