A Saul Aptekar Contribution:
The life cycle of the Mercedes
The origin of the company
dates back to the 1880s, when Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz invented the
internal combustion engine-powered automobile
independently, in southwestern
In the early 1900s, the Daimler cars built at Untertürkheim
(also a city district of Stuttgart) were raced successfully by an Austrian
dealer named Emil Jellinek, who entered the cars
under the name of his daughter, Mercédès.
After suggesting some design modifications, he promised the company a large
order on the conditions that he was granted the exclusive Daimler concession
for
The rival companies of Daimler Motorengesellschaft
and Benz & Cie. started to cooperate in the 1920s
to deal with the economic crisis of those years, and finally merged in 1926 to
become the Daimler-Benz AG, which produced Mercedes-Benz cars and trucks. While
focusing on land vehicles, Mercedes-Benz also built engines to power boats and
airplanes (military and civil), and even Zeppelins.
During the Second World War, Mercedes-Benz is known to have exploited more than
30 000 forced workers and prisoners of war, some of whom would eventually
strike and be sent to concentration camps. This working force soon became
essential to the production capacity of the company since 1941, and was a key
to the construction of Nazi
Mercedes-Benz vehicles have a focus on high quality and state of the art
engineering. As a result they have often been expensive and are made in lower
volumes compared to cheaper cars. The company has carefully cultivated an image
of superior engineering, quality, and service. The cars are often the vehicle
of choice for the rich and famous. Perhaps most famous for limousine models, a
number of notable sports cars have also been produced. For example, the early
supercharged SSK developed by Porsche, and the Gullwing 300SL in 1954. However, Mercedes-Benz has
also produced higher volume, less expensive cars. Interestingly, the prototypes
of the Volkswagen were built and tested in
Their products have been known for the introduction of advanced technologies to
cars—notably fuel injection and anti-lock braking systems, amongst many others.
However, it does not always work: recently, an active brake system installed in
over 600,000 cars has been recalled to fix potential problems. In addition, the
brand's reputation of reliability has been called into question when it was
recently ranked rather low in consumer surveys. To address the problem, the
company invested heavily in recent years to stem the problem.
