As part of the Mercedes-Benz heritage series, “Close-up”, here’s a unique 1960 Mercedes-Benz 300 in Legend Room 5 of the Mercedes-Benz Museum.
This is not just a car, but a measuring car, built for the development engineers in the testing department, of a Mercedes-Benz saloon, W189 series. This is its story.
1: A Half Adenauer, Half Estate
The first thing that will strike you about this car is the long cable connecting it to a Mercedes-Benz 220S (W-111). The cable can be up to 30 meters long, and functions as a kind of LAN, transmitting data from the first car to the various measuring devices installed in the second.
The two-car solution was ingenious. Mercedes-Benz split the actual sensor tech and the storing plus calculation of measurement data between two vehicles. The first car would be running the various tests, while the car in the rear would keep receiving the measurement data. Think of it as telemetry, but via a cable instead of radio signals.
The measuring car itself is a bit of a Frankenstein as the front half of the car looks like a normal “Adenauer” while after the B-pillar, it looks like an estate car with a rather stately behind. The base car is a W189 Mercedes-Benz saloon chosen because it was big but also fast. Not only did this car have to follow the test car with the same speed, but it also had to lug around heavy equipment.
2: A Fast Measuring Car
This Mercedes-Benz 300 Measuring car bore an injection engine from the 1957-62 model, making 160 horsepower with a top speed of 75 MPH. A normal Adenauer was faster but then again, it did not carry all that heavy equipment. The car was in use till the ‘70s, especially on the Untertürkheim test track. That said, it remains road legal and bears the registration S-MH 867.
The insides were not as luxurious as Mercedes-Benz usually is, with no headroom and chairs best thought of as garden furniture. The windows let in a lot of light and sun, baking the engineers inside but thankfully, there was some ventilation on the sides.
Back then, it could transmit fourteen measured values simultaneously to the mobile laboratory, pretty good for its time. There was a radio link between the two cars, and also an onboard generator to run the various instruments.
Today, things are different, data acquisition systems are small and integrated onto tiny computer chips, onboard the prototypes. That said; its cars like the 1960 Mercedes-Benz Measuring vehicle that further turned progress into a possibility.
Right on my man!