Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart

We went to the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. It is not too far from the Mercedes-Benz Arena where Bundsliga's Stuttgart VfB (a football, I mean soccer, club plays). Of course we took advantage of Deutsche Bahn's 28€ Länder ticket. That's right...28€ for the six of us (our family + in-laws). Although the ticket is valid only for 5 passengers traveling together, Jocelyn is less than 6 years old and she is not counted towards the limit.



The building is simply spectacular. Here are a couple more pictures:

The rightmost picture shows the Niederlassung (a branch...or simply put, one giant MB showroom).

Admission to the museum is reasonably priced: 8€ for adults and free for kids. The audio tour is included in the admission, and the lanyards on the audio gizmos were ours to keep at the end of the tour. Here you see Gabriel holding this audio gadget.

The lunch at the museum restaurant was OK. The price is reasonable (given the nice ambience), and unbeatable for kids' meals, which are 1€ each plate (spätzle or fettucini...). After lunch my in-laws spent some time strolling around the showroom. They have their eyes on a compact B-class, which is not available for the US market (although the B-class is available north of 49th parallel, MB probably figures that Americans love gas-guzzlers so much, and there is no reason to market their most gas efficient A- and B-class vehicles).

We started from the 8th floor of the museum, where some of the oldest engines and motorized vehicles are shown. On display are some old zweizylindermotor and vierzylindermotor (two-cylinder and four-cylinder engines...I love how easy it is to string words together in German, and no worry about proper hyphenation). We worked our way down to the main floor, and it was one grand tour of motor car history (sans federal bailout).


Besides the antique MBs, there were a number of more modern and interesting vehicles on display, including a non-bullet-proof Popemobile, and Princess Diana's sports coupe (which was supposedly the only time a British royalty purchased a non-British vehicle and was returned to MB shortly after the purchase due to public outcry. Hmmm..famous British brands such as Land Rover and Jaguar were recently acquired by India's Tata Motors from Ford).

Race cars are prominently featured in the museum as well. Here you see Jocelyn and Gabriel dressed up as F1 drivers standing next to Lewis Hamilton's (2008 F1 world champion) car.

We left the museum around 5PM, and headed back to Königstraße - the main shopping street right outside the main train station. Of course we did not miss the Christmas market there. After (yet another) hearty bratwurst mit brötchen meal (my sausage count since my in-laws' arrival has probably exceeded the total for the past two years already) and glühwein, we returned to Karlsruhe.