Mercedes vs.. Bmw – Museum Visits Comparison

If you go to Germany and you don’t want to miss out or get disappointed I recommend you choose to visit the Mercedes-Benz Museum and never bother with the BMW Museum.

First we visited the Mercedes-Benz museum. Just before we entered this wonderful building we found ourselves standing directly outside the main gate of the Daimler factory in Stuttgart and we were amazed by the cars we saw flying around the nearby streets. There were so many Mercedes designs, all last models and all shiny.  Who said only animals, gypsies and singers were attracted by shiny stuff. We paid the 8 euros fee and entered a museum that was worth maybe 3 times more. Yes, the entry fee was dirty cheep in comparison to what was laying in this enormous building which has 16,500 square meters for you to overcome. We were amazed by the big variety of articles and exhibitions inside. I can only begin to tell you about the great and rich history which was neatly presented to the visitors. It was all presented in such a manner that I felt dizzy while I was leaving the museum. All that research, design and development swept me off my feet. I was  in a different world, in times when Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz were alive and PRODUCTIVE. The brilliant Karl Benz went  to work for several companies, but did not fit well in any of them. Benz loved bicycles and because of them he met two men with whom he  found a company in 1883 called Benz & Cie. Only three years later he was given a patent for creating the first automobile fueled by gas. Benz designed the first truck in history and the first boxer engine. Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach designed the world’s first four-wheeled automobile which had a four-speed transmission. In 1890 Daimler founded the Daimler Motoren-Gesellschaft which later became Benz’s main competitor.  The main designer of DMG, Wilhelm Maybach, built an engine to the specifications of Emil Jellinek who wanted to buy the vehicles and become a dealer of the special series. Jellinek wanted the new engine to be named Daimler-Mercedes. In Spanish Mercedes means grace. This is also the name of Jellinek’s own daughter. In 1926 both companies merged in order to overcome the difficulties of the economic crisis. The company received the name Daimler-Benz and all its automobiles would come out from the production line under the name Mercedes Benz. In the museum you can find many materials about the respectful treatment of the workers which you can’t see in today’s corporations. There are numerous interesting stories about the inventors, the company’s marketing techniques, the way the business was run. At some point the factories had burned down and the management had to think of ways to find work for each one of their employees. It was really a great company with a much greater history behind it.  While the company history is presented, atmospheric music comes from the loudspeakers, representing even better the times long gone by. Very interesting exhibitions are for example the first car with ashtray, requested by the king Ferdinand of Bulgaria, the Mercedes car of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the first Mercedes buses, the sport cars of the different times, the bicycles and the formula cars. Too many to list all them here. At the end we were given a souvenir from the museum to help save the good memories of the museum.

When we went to see the BMW Museum we paid 12 euros for each ticket. We got inside. There was no tour guide provided as it was in the Mercedes Benz museum. We passed by a few old models of cars, motorbikes and engines and my eyes had already started to hurt. The inscriptions which the visitors were supposed to read for each exhibit looked modern but were incredibly hard to read. So I stopped reading at about the twentieth minute. While we spend three and a half hours in the Mercedes-Benz Museum, we found ourselves on the exit door forty minutes after we had entered the BMW Museum. All we could see were some not that interesting regular automobiles. There were no trucks, no fire-fighter’s vehicles, buses, no ski, massage seats and amazing auto models, etc. No atmospheric music, only people walking around. The shop is damn expensive, like everything other about BMW and there was no souvenir at the end of the visit. It was our one and only disappointment from the 2009 trip to Germany and I wish none of my friends will ever make the mistake we did. It is not worth it. What you might enjoy is the BMW Welt (BMW World) Showroom which is free and has cool stuff about dynamic drive, interactive games and mechanics. You can see the newest models from the automobile manufacturer and if you are a BMW fan you can even buy one there. The building is fascinating and if I remember correctly it costs approximately 400 million dollars. In conclusion, the BMW museum is not worth seeing but the BMW Welt can be fun even though there is not much to see.

Overall, if you are visiting Germany for a short period and you really want to create memories that will stay vivid for your whole life, you should go straight to Stuttgart and visit the Mercedes arena. The real retro cars fans shall visit both.