In 1969, there was a rumor that Mercedes-Benz would launch a distinctive car at the Frankfurt Motor Show. It would show the future of Mercedes-Benz and the entire automobile industry. It looked different from other cars on the road at the time, used advanced technology, and might even subvert the entire automotive industry. If this rumor were carried out today, it is estimated that the release platform would be at CES instead of the auto show. For the automobile industry 50 years ago, what was the concept of "disruption"?
It turns out that most of the rumors are not groundless.
It is widely speculated that this will be a successor model to the 300SL, but Mercedes-Benz’s idea is much crazier. Mercedes-Benz's development team is designing a pilot vehicle that will serve as a test bed for future developments. The car is kept highly secret and is expected to form the basis for future Mercedes-Benz products and technologies.
Mercedes-Benz C111—probably the most fanciful “concept car” 50 years ago. Fiberglass body, gull-wing doors, rotary engine. The media of the day had cameras and notebooks in hand as they tried to take photos of the gorgeous machine, flashes of light coming from all directions clashing with the car's streamlined fiberglass body in bright orange. Say it is the successor of the 300SL, and it does have a gull-wing door design; say it is not, because apart from the gull-wing doors, it has nothing to do with the 300SL. This hints at public speculation that this car was originally intended to be the successor to the 300SL, but now, this new car exceeds even the public's wildest expectations.
Mercedes-Benz positions the C111 as an "experimental car." It will serve as a testbed for future Mercedes-Benz bodywork and future models. There are two ways to understand this sentence - C111 will be very crazy, but C111 will not be mass produced. It has several "small goals", testing the use of fiberglass reinforced plastics in car body shells and testing a new engine concept, a rotary engine designed by Felix Wankel.
But C111 is not entirely the work of Mercedes-Benz’s technical geeks to vent their madness.
To say that it has never considered mass production, I don’t think so. In addition to technology, C111 also displays the concept of luxury. It experimented with cabin-friendly comfort features, such as luxurious leather upholstery and air conditioning. In the 1960s, air conditioning was not a common feature on cars, let alone extreme supercars like this, which meant that Mercedes-Benz engineers had something other than technology in mind when designing this car. The limit, but the future of automobiles.
At the 1970 Geneva Motor Show, Mercedes-Benz launched a minor facelift of the C111, the C111-II. Compared to the first generation, the second version offers better visibility while improving the car's aerodynamics. In addition, the C111 is also the first car designed entirely by computers. Mercedes said that not only can engineers predict dynamic loads through computers, but the computers also help speed up the entire project by four months.
Let’s take a closer look at this car, from Bruno Sacco’s gorgeous appearance to the iconic Weissherbst paint, the 1969 C111-I with a 280-horsepower three-rotor engine, the 1970 C ?111-II has a 450-horsepower four-rotor engine with top speeds of 270 and 300 km/h, while the C111-II can accelerate from zero to 100 km/h in 4.9 seconds. At first glance, it looks like a supercar that is neither cheap nor easy to mess with.
Another point is that C111 is actually an "off-topic" work. The C111 project began in 1963 with the goal of developing a "small, inexpensive sports car". Remember, it was around the same time that Ford and a young executive named Lee Iacocca began designing the Ford Mustang on the other side of the Atlantic. This was an era when automakers realized that baby boomers were hungry for affordable sports cars. However, German engineers are German engineers, and they over-designed the C111, a bit too much.
What is even more regrettable is that the two "small goals" of C111 do not seem to be the right direction for future cars.
By the early 1970s, passive safety became an increasingly important factor in automobile development.
Compared with the traditional thin steel body, the C111's fiberglass body and composite materials have inherent disadvantages in terms of safety and are very easy to break in an impact. This is enough to sentence it to "death".
The same is true for rotary engines. Mazda is the only brand that has mass-produced rotary engines and continues to do so today. Why Mazda? Because before them, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz also tried rotary engines, but gave up, so this small but sophisticated Japanese brand, which always focuses on researching black technology for cars, obtained a patent. But Mercedes-Benz's closing report is that its reliability and durability do not meet Mercedes-Benz's high standards. To put the rotary engine into mass production, the current testing and research are far from enough. The United States is increasingly Tighter emissions regulations are proving to be an additional headache.
In 1971, Mercedes-Benz decided not to mass-produce the C111. Even though they received some intended orders, and even car fans wrote blank checks to buy this car, it was to no avail. The story of C111 does not end here. Don’t forget, it is positioned as a “test vehicle”.
The oil crisis and the concept of environmental protection have once again given C111 a new mission. To counter the reputation of compression-ignition engines as noisy and lacking in power, Mercedes-Benz's testing department installed a 3.0-liter 5-cylinder diesel engine in the C111-II, known internally as the C111-IID. The test vehicle was turbocharged And intercooling system, this OM?617?LA engine transplanted from the W?115 series provides 190 horsepower. In June 1976, C?111-II?D broke 16 records in one test at the Nardo oval track in Italy, 13 of which were new records for diesel vehicles, and the other three were new Car records.
This is not all of C111’s crazy output.
Successor model C111-III, a 230-horsepower diesel version - set 9 more world records in 1978. In 1979, the last version of this car - the C111-IV equipped with a 4.8-liter V8 gasoline engine - set the track top speed record at the time of 403.978?km/h.
Is there a successor model of C111? In 1991, a supercar named C112 was unveiled. It is a road-going version of the C11 racing car, equipped with an M120 V12 engine and a 6-speed manual transmission. The body is made by Italian manufacturer Carrozzeria Coggiolo, and the chassis is provided by Mercedes-Benz.
Like C111, C112 also shows some disruptive designs. The mainstream design of supercars at that time was pop-up headlights, that is, pop-up lights or flip-up lights, as was the case with the C111. But Mercedes-Benz decided to use two fixed lights on the car because pop-up headlights would increase drag and create aerodynamic turbulence. The C112 also features a gull-wing door design, like its predecessor, in homage to the iconic 300SL. The smooth aerodynamic body, combined with the A-pillar-mounted rearview mirrors, gave the car a drag coefficient of 0.30, the lowest among sports cars at the time. And this time, it seems that Mercedes-Benz was right about the direction of future cars - pop-up headlights were banned for safety reasons a few years later, and reducing wind resistance has become a formula for car design.
But like a curse, although more than 700 intended orders were received, the C112 production plan was also shelved. This made me feel sorry for Mercedes-AMG, which has been delayed again and again? PROJECT?ONE is worried about the future.
Today, 50 years later, super car fans still often talk about this "concept car" that does not seem to belong to that era. This is enough to prove how subversive the Mercedes-Benz C111 is. Unfortunately, no one Even if you become its owner, it will never be able to freely run on the road.
This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.