Car Museums in Stuttgart

(Darren heavily edited this since I don't know much about cars.  Try and figure out which sentences are mine and which he added.)

Sorry for being late to post.  Things got a little crazy last week with my ongoing search for a post-move job in the Bay Area; hopefully I'll have some good news to share on that front later this week.  In the meantime, I'll jump back a month to finish writing about our quick weekend trip to Germany in December.  On Saturday the 9th, after doing lots of Christmas activities the day before, we shifted gears (get it? :) and spent the day in Stuttgart going to car museums.  If you remember, Stuttgart was our very first trip in Europe, but our main goal while visiting last time was to get our visas, so we didn't have a chance to see many sights.  This time, Stuttgart was on the way home from Rothenburg and Nuremberg, so it seemed like a good opportunity to go back and see some things we missed.  Our main focus was to see the Porsche and Mercedes car museums.  Did you know that the automobile was invented in Stuttgart and these two car companies were founded there as well?  I didn't know that until we visited these museums.

We first went to the Porsche Museum and spent the late morning and much of the afternoon there.  We bought the audio guides at both museums and walked around to see a variety of cars from throughout each company's long history.  I felt the Porsche Museum wasn't as good as the BMW museum because I don't feel like it gave enough background about the company's founder, Ferdinand Porsche, or about the history of the company in general.  Mostly, the museum just showed lots of cars, with a strong emphasis on their success in high-octane racing. 

This is the Porsche 356, the company's first production car and the first one they produced with the name "Porsche"

The silver one on the left was the model James Dean was driving when he died in a crash

The 356 Spyder

Looking at the dashboard of one of the roadsters

Some aerodynamic racing cars from the latter half of the 20th century; the yellow and purple one that you can barely see on the left end of the line has something like 1200 horsepower!

A late-model 911; Darren wants one like this

My love, the Panamera

Probably the closest he'll get to this anytime soon, unless he buys me a Panamera :)

The outside of the museum, which was redone in 2008

Even though the Porsche museum wasn't my favorite (since I'm not really a racing enthusiast), it was still fun to visit.  Plus, they had a very affordable cafe (who would have thought that anything at the Porsche Museum would be inexpensive?) where I again enjoyed my favorite Swabian dish, called Maultaschen, which filled me right up.  I love eating in Germany!  (I'm already scoping out German restaurants in the Bay Area, anyone want to join?) 

Next, we drove over to the Mercedes-Benz Museum.  This was a much more comprehensive museum because the founders were the inventors of the first automobiles, as I learned.  Thus, the scope of the museum was much wider, and they covered a lot of concepts in the development of motor transportation, rather than just focusing on 60 years of race cars.  Carl Benz filed a patent for a three-wheeled automobile in 1886, while Gottlieb Daimler converted a stagecoach into an automobile later that year.

A replica of Carl Benz's automobile invention

A replica of Gottlieb Daimler's four-wheeled automobile

Built in 1902 and once owned by the Vanderbilts, this is the oldest Mercedes in existence (cool, huh?!)

The Mercedes name actually comes from an extremely wealthy racing enthusiast, Emil Jellinek, who had Daimler's company build a car to his specifications.  He named that model after his daughter, Mercedes.  The Mercedes model and its successors became so popular that they came to define the brand for all the company's future cars.  Daimler and Benz's companies merged in the 1920s and the Mercedes-Benz name was born.

One of the stylish touring cars from the 1930s that was popular with heads of state

An example of more affordable post-WWII cars manufactured by Mercedes

As we went through the museum in order of the history of the company, it was funny to read how quite often, major safety and fuel economy changes were forced upon these car companies by US policies.  Instead of making separate cars that fit US standards, the company just redesigned most of their cars and so safety, fuel economy, and environmental impact were improved worldwide.  They talked about US pollution regulations and had a picture of Ralph Nader highlighting the poor safety standards in automobiles in the 1960s.  US politics may drive you crazy, but sometimes we do things that affect the world for good.

Mercedes not only makes standard commercial cars, but also ambulances, trucks, buses, construction vehicles, etc.  They highlighted some of these other vehicles in the museum as well, and since Darren likes to see everything, we went over to take a look at them.

This truck is basically a giant snowblower

Can't forget all the fancy limos Mercedes has made over the years for people like the Emperor of Japan

The very first Popemobile

Overall, I enjoyed the Mercedes museum more, but the BMW one was still my favorite.  Either way, it was still a great day and I'm glad we made time to see these before we moved.  I guess we just should have bought some guidebooks for the museums so we could remember the names and significance of all the cars we saw!  After finishing at the museums, we left Stuttgart and drove back to Zurich to prepare to leave for the US just a few days later to spend time with family for Christmas.