Day 8: Inside The Mercedes Hidden Garages

Stuttgart is an absolutely charming city yet it’s also perhaps the most logo centric city I’ve ever visited. Everywhere you turn the three-pointed Mercedes Benz star looms. From the top of the massive downtown train station to the sides of little newspaper stands buried deep down narrow alleys, the logo seems omnipresent and no matter how much you try, you simply can’t avoid it.

At first blush this overt style of civic branding seems over done, yet among all the buildings that feature the brand logo the two buildings that do not are perhaps the most special locations in the entire city when it comes to cars.

The folks at Mercedes Benz simply call these two buildings, ‘the Hidden Garages’ - for the most logical of reasons – because they’re hidden.

They’re not on a map. You can’t find them online. They simply don’t exist – well, at least not if you wish to purchase a ticket to step inside.

The Main Stuttgart Train Station

When I first heard the term, ‘hidden garages’, I thought it sounded like a great PR slogan – perhaps a neat twist on the usual private car collection of a major automotive company – but when you stand in front of these two unremarkable buildings and watch the garage door roll up for the first time it quickly becomes clear that the name has nothing to do with marketing, but rather the very foundation of the modern automobile.

The Three Wheeler - the world’s first car

Because what sits inside is a concrete lineage of every step on the automotive evolutionary timeline. From the very first car ever built – the three wheeler – to the earliest examples of vehicles that look like a modern cars, to one of the iconic sportscars of the fifties, the 300 SL Gullwing, to actual Indy winning racers. The breath and width of the collection is well beyond impressive – it’s unreal. If you’re a gearhead this place is a mecca of immense proportions.

Everyone’s personal favorite - the 300SL

Yet perhaps the most exciting feature of the hidden garages is not the actual cars - but rather the mindset that accompanies them. These historical pieces are not museum pieces, but rather still functional automobiles that still see use. The attitude here is that someone built these cars to run and that means they should be. Most companies would treat such sacred models with kid gloves and pristine exhibits, but the folks here drive the dickens out of these wonderful vehicles on a regular basis with a passionate abandon. They don’t just want them to move, they want them to live and to breath! It’s a remarkable and very, very special outlook to say the least.

An Indy Winning Benz

Day 9: Mercedes Design Center

The Mercedes Benz Design Center in Sindelfingen stands 180 degrees away from yesterday’s trip to the Mercedes Benz Hidden Garages. While the garages are about the past, the design center is not so surprisingly about the future of the brand. Today that future is run by head designer Prof. Peter Pfeiffer, who recently penned the new S Class line. Spending time with him was a fascinating window in a very different type of design world.

For starters the Mercedes Benz Design studio is a massive installation. There are buildings on top of buildings and the campus goes on forever. Once you find your way inside the main location, the physical scale almost overwhelms you. It feels like an indoor athletic practice facility not a working design studio. Every detail in the space spells out a whole other level of seriousness compared to some of the smaller car companies – smaller being a relative term here, I’m not talking about 3,000 unit companies, but rather other high volume spots.

The skill that’s exhibited in this massive space transcends the usual lines and engineering speak, somehow offering a combination of a very high level of problem solving and a rather unique amount of insight into how people actually use their vehicles on a daily basis. This was the first stop on this automotive odyssey where the usual design catch phrases were replaced with what I thought were some particularly astute perceptions into how the human condition functions inside of a car. In our wide ranging discussions, the two topics that stood out the most were how people use their cars in the morning versus how they use them after work, followed by the seemingly routine activity of interfacing with a cell phone or nav system. Both are topics I don’t normally think about for myself nor normally see blatantly addressed in the mainstream automotive world. Yet here they were focal points for discussion. It wasn’t just some small throw away line, but actual thought provoking conversation and that struck me as surprising.

I’m sure other car companies think about these things, but here they’re actually verbalized at the very beginning of the conversation and if stuff like this is on the tip of a head designers tongue while you’re doing a television interview it’s clearly a point of importance.

Day 10: Mercedes at the Château Solitude

After two long days of interviews and engrossing conversations, today was substantially more mellow adventure. I suppose that’s in part because we spent the day shooting various b-roll tracking shots of the new S Class at the Château Solitude just outside of Stuttgart. To be honest I didn’t get a chance to find out any of the history of the estate, but as backdrops go it’s an impressive setting.

The Mercedes Benz SSK