So, here’s a question nobody in a pub ever gets right: which country invented the car?
Yep. Germany.
In 1886 Carl Benz pushed a wobbly three-wheeler out of a workshop in Mannheim, and the world hasn’t sat still since. About four million cars still roll off assembly lines inside Germany every year, and German brands build roughly twice that again at plants scattered around the planet.
Those numbers used to be bigger, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The industry is in the roughest stretch it has had in living memory. But if you like cars even a little bit, you have still picked the right country to wander around in.
Where It All Started
It begins with a man who was trying to build a better engine, not a car. Nikolaus August Otto put together the first practical four-stroke engine in 1876 at his factory in Deutz (nowadays a district of Cologne). Engineers still call it the Otto cycle, and it is still what’s rumbling away under the hood of most petrol cars on the road. Not bad for one of Germany’s quieter inventions.
Ten years later, down in Mannheim, Carl Benz patented his Patent-Motorwagen Nummer 1. Three wheels, less than one horsepower, and a top speed a decent jogger could match. That is the first automobile.
Here’s the part that still gets me, though. In that exact same year, barely 100 km / 62 mi away in Stuttgart‘s Bad Cannstatt district, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach were bolting an engine onto a horse carriage. Same idea, same year, and as far as anyone knows the two teams never met.
Then there’s Bertha Benz, who deserves a lot more credit than she usually gets. In 1888 she took her husband’s car without asking (oops!), loaded up their two teenage sons, and drove about 106 km / 66 mi from Mannheim to Pforzheim. Along the way she poked a blocked fuel line clear with a hatpin, insulated a wire with her garter, and talked a cobbler into nailing leather onto the brake blocks (congratulations, you have just watched somebody invent the brake lining). She also stopped at the Stadt-Apotheke in Wiesloch for cleaning solvent, which quietly turned a village pharmacy into the world’s first filling station.
She left Carl a note.
You can drive the exact route today, and you should, at the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.
The Big Names Today
Four groups do most of the work, and each one is welded to a particular city. Handy, if you want to build a trip around it.
Volkswagen Group — Wolfsburg
Europe’s biggest carmaker, and you can see the four chimneys of the main plant from the platform at Wolfsburg station. The group owns Volkswagen itself plus Audi (Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm), Porsche (Stuttgart), Škoda, SEAT, Cupra, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Ducati. (Yep, really.) German plants are scattered all over the map: Zwickau, Emden, Osnabrück, Salzgitter, Dresden, and Baunatal just outside Kassel.
And then there’s the Käfer. The Beetle. More than 21 million of them, which is more than any other single car design in history.
Its origin is uncomfortable, and I would rather say so than tiptoe around it. Ferdinand Porsche designed it as the “KdF-Wagen” for the Nazi state, Wolfsburg was founded in 1938 purely as a company town to build it, and forced labor was used at the factory during World War II. What turned the thing into a legend was the second act, when British officers restarted the bombed-out plant in 1945 and the funny little round car ended up as the rolling symbol of West Germany getting back on its feet (a.k.a. the Wirtschaftswunder (Economic Miracle)).
Mercedes-Benz Group — Stuttgart
Headquarters sit in Stuttgart’s Untertürkheim district. Not in Sindelfingen, which is where half the internet will tell you they are (Sindelfingen is the biggest plant and it builds the S-Class, so you can see how the mix-up happens). Other German sites include Bremen, Rastatt, and Berlin, with offices spilling over into Böblingen next door.
If you read an older article calling the company Daimler, that is not a mistake. It was Daimler AG for decades, and renamed itself Mercedes-Benz Group in 2022 after spinning off its truck division. Same company, new sign on the building.
Mercedes also builds cars that flatly refuse to die. Drive through any German town and you will spot 25-year-old taxis still doing the school run.
BMW Group — Munich
Bayerische Motoren Werke, headquartered in a Munich tower shaped like four cylinders, which tells you roughly everything about how seriously they take this. BMW dates itself to 1916 and started out building aircraft engines. German plants: Munich, Dingolfing, Regensburg, and Leipzig. The group owns MINI and Rolls-Royce as well, though both of those are actually built in England.
Right, two myths while I am here. That blue-and-white roundel is not a spinning propeller. It is the Bavarian state colors, and the propeller story came from an advert in 1929 that everybody took literally. And the small one is the 1 Series. A lowercase i (i4, i5, iX) means electric. Easy to muddle.
Opel And Ford
Not every German car wears a premium badge, and honestly these two have put more of us on the road than all the fancy names put together. Opel has been building things in Rüsselsheim since 1862: sewing machines first, then bicycles, then cars from 1899, with a second plant over in Eisenach. It belonged to General Motors for close to ninety years, went to the French PSA group in 2017, and now sits inside Stellantis. Ford has been building cars in Cologne since the 1930s and has turned the site into a dedicated electric vehicle plant.
German Cars By The Numbers
| Cars built inside Germany each year | About 4 million |
| Built by German brands abroad | About twice that again |
| People the industry employs | Around 700,000 |
| New German-built cars with a plug | Roughly 4 in 10 |
| Where Germany ranks | 5th in the world, 1st in Europe |
| Length of the Autobahn network | About 13,200 km / 8,200 mi |
| The car’s birthday | 1886, in Mannheim |
That employment figure has been sliding for years, by the way. Electrification, energy costs, and some very serious competition out of China are squeezing everybody, and the suppliers are getting it worse than the big names. We still build cars beautifully. We just build fewer of them. The German economy page has the wider picture.
Car Museums Worth Your Time
German car museums are not dusty halls with velvet ropes. A couple of them are among the best-designed museums in the country, full stop, and worth the trip even if cars leave you cold. Bring somebody who loves them and watch that person come apart. ;-)
- Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart. A lift fires you up to the ninth floor and you spiral back down through 130 years of history, opening with Benz’s Patent-Motorwagen itself. Over 160 vehicles. The double-helix building alone is worth the ticket. Give it three hours, not one. And while you are in town, Stuttgart’s other museums are no slouch either.
- Porsche Museum, Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. Smaller, whiter, sharper. Around eighty cars at a time, rotated out of a collection of hundreds, plus a window into the workshop where they keep the whole lot running. You can do this and the Mercedes museum on the same day. You will be wrecked by dinner, but you can.
- BMW Museum and BMW Welt, Munich. Two buildings facing each other at the Olympiapark. The free one, BMW Welt, is the showroom, and it is where everybody queues. The ticketed one across the road is where the actual history lives. Guess which one I would send you to. Munich’s other museums are minutes away on the U-Bahn.
- Autostadt, Wolfsburg. Not really a museum. It is 28 hectares / 70 acres of car theme park right next to the VW plant, with brand pavilions, an off-road course, and the excellent ZeitHaus. Set aside a full day. Take the kids, too, because they will last longer here than anywhere else on this list.
- Audi museum mobile, Ingolstadt. A glass drum with a paternoster lift carrying cars around in permanent slow motion. Audi, DKW, Horch, Wanderer, and NSU.
- August Horch Museum, Zwickau. My favorite, and I will defend it. It sits inside the actual factory where the first Audi was built, and it tells the Saxon half of the story that nearly everybody skips: Horch, Auto Union, the Trabant, and today’s electric VWs. There is a reconstructed 1930s street in there, shop windows and all. Go here before Stuttgart rather than after, or it will feel small—and it isn’t.
- Technik Museum, Sinsheim. Cars, yes. Also a Concorde and a Tupolev Tu-144 bolted to the roof at take-off angle. Subtle it is not.
- PS.SPEICHER, Einbeck. A converted grain store in Lower Saxony holding one of Europe’s biggest collections of cars, bikes, and mopeds.
- Automuseum PROTOTYP, Hamburg. Small, personal, racing-flavored. See Hamburg museums for the rest of the city.
Want the very beginning of the story instead? The TECHNOSEUM in Mannheim covers Benz’s earliest work, and Mannheim museums has the rest.
Factory Tours
Most of the big manufacturers run guided plant tours, and they are properly impressive: press shops stamping out a body panel every few seconds, halls full of robots, and final assembly at the end of it. Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, BMW in Munich, Audi in Ingolstadt, Mercedes-Benz in Sindelfingen, and Porsche in Zuffenhausen all do them.
Book early. And I do not mean “a few days early”—I mean weeks. English-language slots are limited and they go. Check the minimum age too, somewhere between six and fourteen depending on the plant, and leave the camera in the hotel, because you will not be allowed to use it anyway. Tours also stop during summer shutdown and over Christmas, so check the calendar before you build a whole trip around one.
The Autobahn
The famous bit is true: on a good chunk of the network there is no general speed limit. But “no limit” gets misunderstood constantly, so let me clear it up. Roughly a third of the Autobahn has permanent limits. Plenty more has electronic ones that change with traffic and weather. And where there is nothing at all, there is still a Richtgeschwindigkeit—an advisory speed of 130 km/h (about 81 mph). Only go faster than that if you’re well experienced and safe.
A few things that catch visitors out:
- Never overtake on the right. We Germans take this seriously, and it is exactly why the left lane empties the second a fast car appears behind you.
- Keep right unless you are actually overtaking. Sitting in the middle or left lane is bad manners, and it is finable.
- The Rettungsgasse. The moment traffic slows to a crawl, everybody forms an emergency corridor between the left lane and the rest. You are expected to do it before you hear a siren, not after.
- Low-emission zones. A lot of city centers need an Umweltplakette sticker in the windshield. Rental cars usually have one. Usually.
- Do not run out of fuel. Stopping on the Autobahn without a real emergency is an offense. Yes, really.
The German Autobahn page covers the history and the layout of the thing.
The Green Hell
The Nürburgring Nordschleife sits out in the Eifel hills: 20.8 km / 12.9 mi, 73 corners, and about 300 m / 1,000 ft of elevation change from the lowest point to the highest. Jackie Stewart called it the Green Hell and the name stuck, because it fits. Manufacturers from all over the world still come here to prove their cars, and on Touristenfahrten days the track opens to the public, so you can buy a lap and drive it in your own car.
Everybody photographs the sign. Far fewer people book the lap. Your call. ;-)
The 24-hour race here is one of the biggest sporting events in the country, with well over a hundred cars circulating at once. Down south, the Hockenheimring near Hockenheim hosted the German Grand Prix for decades and still runs a busy calendar of touring car racing and festivals. Easy day trip from Mannheim or Heidelberg.
Questions I Get Asked
Who actually invented the car?
Carl Benz. He patented the Benz Patent-Motorwagen in Mannheim in January 1886, and it is widely accepted as the first automobile with an internal combustion engine. Daimler and Maybach were chasing the same thing in Stuttgart at the same time, completely independently, which still seems unlikely to me every time I write it down.
Which brands are actually German?
Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, MINI, Opel, and Smart, plus the truck and bus people like MAN and Daimler Truck. Ford builds cars in Cologne but is American-owned, and MINI and Rolls-Royce are British marques that happen to belong to BMW.
Is there really no speed limit on the Autobahn?
On a large part of it, no general limit applies. Limits are common near cities, junctions, and roadworks, and anywhere the electronic signs say so. Everywhere else, the advisory speed is 130 km/h (about 81 mph).
If I have only got time for one museum, which one?
Stuttgart, the Mercedes-Benz Museum. It is the only one that tells the story of the automobile itself instead of one brand’s version of it, and it opens with the actual first car. (My heart says Zwickau. My head says Stuttgart.)
Can I visit a car factory?
Yes. VW, BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche all run public tours. Book weeks ahead, check the minimum age, and do not assume there is an English tour every day.
Curious what else this country builds? Have a look at Made in Germany, German engineering, and German companies.
Right. I am off to check train times to Zwickau. Again. ;-)