Car Wars by John J. Fialka

Car Wars by John J. Fialka

Author:John J. Fialka
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466849600
Publisher: St. Martin's Press


SIXTEEN

Running Ahead of the Pack

German engineers began showing up at Ballard’s fuel cell skunkworks in the early 1990s. They were from Daimler AG, one of the largest vehicle manufacturers in the world and, perhaps, the most technology-hungry.

The Stuttgart-based company, feeling it was falling behind the United States and Japan in automotive electronics, had opened up a major research department in the 1980s and it sent its engineers and scientists scouting the world for ways to take back the lead in the fast-growing and highly competitive global market. The Daimler visitors carried a certain amount of engineering pride with them, a mind-set that comes from producing Mercedes-Benz, probably the best-known luxury car in the world.

“For Mercedes, one of the brand’s images is to be a technology leader. So they could not accept that others could be in the lead,” was how one of the new visitors to Vancouver, Andreas Truckenbrodt, later described it. But the Daimler men did not come off as being arrogant, rubbing the Ballard team the wrong way the way GM’s representatives had.

Daimler’s credentials as a leader in the automobile business go all the way back to the very start, in 1883, when two German inventors, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, working independently of each other, developed the first internal combustion engines that were light and yet strong enough to propel a car. They both built companies and designed cars. Daimler’s were so good that in 1899, after winning a series of the world’s first auto races in Nice, France, with a specially built, low-slung, and powerful car Emil Jellinek, the driver, was impressed enough to name it after his daughter, Mercedes.

Mercedes-Benz, the name the two companies took after they were merged in 1926, was built upon a history of defying doubters and dazzling critics. Benz, nearly broke after the early days of his research, watched his investors walk away when they heard he was building something as silly and useless as a horseless carriage. They wanted him to use his engines to power pumps, a solid business that, they felt, was the real future for this noisy, but powerful machine.

Much later Mercedes-Benz built a flashy modern museum in downtown Stuttgart where the first thing visitors see is an empty room containing only one thing: a stuffed horse. There is no explanation except for a small silver plate screwed into its wooden platform bearing an engraved quotation from one of their most illustrious critics, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor. He is believed to have said: “I do believe in the horse. The automobile is no more than a transitory phenomenon.”

Benz, a cautious but stubborn engineer, learned to maneuver his way around opposition to his startling new technology. In 1895 it seemed to come from all levels of German society. He made a horseless carriage in his rented shop, installed his engine, and took it out for a spin on the backstreets of Mannheim. The local police were so outraged at the explosive racket and speed of



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