Cobble Beach Classics plots Mercedes’ evolution from 1886 Patent Motorwagen to 2021 AMG GT P-One Edition
“It’s a lot harder getting specific vehicles from a marque, in a sequence charting the evolution, rather than getting [a variety of] performance cars or muscle cars, which gives you a lot of flexibility,” explains Rob McCleese, chair of the Cobble Beach Concours d’Elegance, which runs the CIAS feature. “And then being Mercedes, they didn’t make a whole lot of these cars in the first place.”
Nevertheless, McCleese and his team have managed to collect eight incredible Benzes to display this year, most of them local to Ontario, and they do indeed chronicle the carmaker’s evolution, starting with its very first vehicle, the 1886 Benz Patent Motorwagen—okay, well, a replica of one.
The original Patent Motorwagen is long gone, but there are more than a few replicas around; Mercedes-Benz itself commissioned the U.K.’s John Bentley Engineering to build a run of about 100 copies to commemorate the car’s centenary roughly 35 years ago. The replica at the CIAS comes out of the Lane Motor Museum in Tennessee, and is fully functional, though the drivetrain behaves a little “quirky, shall we say,” notes McCleese.
The Lane Museum also offered McCleese its 1935 Mercedes-Benz 130H, a car he’d never heard of before; after looking up some images, he realized just how, ahem, unconventional the thing looked. Benz made only about 4,000 examples of the rear-engined experimental auto, and while a commercial flop, some of its engineering innovations influenced later cars like the Volkswagen Beetle.
The diminutive 130H makes for a stark contrast to the 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540K Sport Tourer you’ll see a few feet away, an imposing, long, and low roadster on loan from the Gilmore Car Museum in Michigan. This particular example is the only one remaining of two built, and the secret to its survival lies in its original owner’s decision to brick it up in the basement of his house in Dresden, Germany to spare it from the bombings that rocked that city during the Second World War. It stayed hidden behind those walls some 60 years before it was finally unearthed.
