Concepts · 2009
The apprentices’ time machine.
A hundred and fifty trainees, one year, and a question: what would the first car in history look like if you built it again — with a fuel cell?
April 2009, on the road from Mannheim to Pforzheim. A strange white machine on tall wire wheels hums along the route Bertha Benz took in 1888, when she borrowed her husband’s invention without asking and drove into history. This time, the exhaust is water.
The F-CELL Roadster was never meant for a motor show pedestal. It was built as a lesson — by the people who were still learning.
Chapter I
A classroom on wheels.
For about a year, more than 150 trainees and students at the Sindelfingen plant carried the project from concept to finished vehicle — apprentice mechatronics engineers, model makers, electronics technicians, painters, product designers and upholsterers, each trade contributing its piece.
The official goal was to bring alternative drive systems into vocational training as hands-on experience. The unofficial result was one of the most charming machines Mercedes has ever shown.
Every element quotes a different century. The tall wire-spoked wheels are pure 1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen; the white fiberglass nose is borrowed from a Formula One car; the bucket seats are carbon fiber under hand-stitched leather.
And instead of a steering wheel there is a drive-by-wire joystick — which sounds futuristic until you remember the Patent-Motorwagen had no steering wheel either. That invention was still years away in 1886. The joystick is the tiller, reborn.
- Fuel cell output
- 1.2 kW
- Top speed
- 25 km/h
- Range
- 350 km
- Builders
- 150+
Chapter II
Bertha’s road, again.
The fuel cell sits at the rear and makes all of 1.2 kilowatts — about a horsepower and a half, close kin to the two-thirds of a horsepower Carl Benz managed in 1886. Top speed is a bicycle-like 25 km/h. But the tank is good for 350 kilometers, and in April 2009 the Roadster used them well: it retraced the Bertha Benz Memorial Route, the world’s first road trip, on hydrogen.
In 1888, Bertha Benz bought ligroin at a pharmacy in Wiesloch — the first filling station on Earth. Her machine’s successor, 121 years later, was once again a vehicle ahead of its fuel supply.
Epilogue
The slowest concept, the longest view.
No concept car in this collection is slower, and few say more. The F-CELL Roadster taught a cohort of apprentices — the people who would spend their careers building electric Mercedes — that a drivetrain revolution is something you can assemble with your own hands. And it made a quiet claim about continuity: from ligroin to hydrogen, the company that built the first car intends to build whatever counts as a car next.