Concepts · 1996
The car without a steering wheel.
Paris, 1996: Mercedes asked whether the car of the future still needed a wheel and pedals — then answered with joysticks in the doors.
At the Paris Motor Show in October 1996, visitors circled a turquoise coupé whose cabin looked unfinished. There was no steering wheel. No pedals. Just three little sidesticks — one in each door, one on the center console — and a band of color screens where the instruments used to be.
Mercedes called it the F 200 Imagination. Built with Italian coachbuilder Stola and designed at the Advanced Design studio in Tokyo, it was a research car pretending to be a dream car — and, almost as an afterthought, a preview of the next CL and S-Class.
Chapter I
Drive by wire, drive by either hand.
Push a sidestick forward to accelerate, pull back to brake, lean left or right to steer. Buttons on the stick handled indicators, horn, lights and wipers. Because there was no mechanical column, either front occupant could take control — the passenger’s door held a third stick of its own.
The electronics read the stick as a request for a driving state, then decided, from sensors reading speed, wheelspin and body motion, the safest way to comply. Mercedes called the whole idea drive-by-wire.
The company was serious enough to build a second prototype — an R129 SL fitted with sidesticks — and test it through 1998. Series production never came. What did come was the electronic steering that every modern Mercedes uses under its wheel, and eventually the systems that let a car drive itself.
Across the dash, color monitors replaced the cluster and mirrors. Cameras in the corners of the roof and the rear bumper fed the screens — side-mirror cameras in 1996.
Under the hood
6.0liters
M120 V12 · 389 hp — because even a research car about joysticks still needed a proper Mercedes engine.
Chapter II
The face of two production cars.
Almost incidentally, the F 200 showed what a large modern coupé could look like. Its oval grille, soft proportions and pillarless glasshouse heralded the C215 CL of 1999; its front end also previewed the W220 S-Class of 1998. The dihedral doors were showmanship. The perforated grille and wheels, oddly, foreshadowed Burmester speaker grilles years later.
Underneath sat the first public demonstration of Active Body Control — fully active suspension that would reach the CL in 1999 — plus window airbags, variable light distribution, an electro-transparent panoramic roof and Linguatronic voice control.
From Imagination to showroom
F 200 features and their Mercedes series debut
- Window airbags
- 1998 · W210 E-Class
- Active Body Control
- 1999 · C215 CL
- Bi-xenon active headlamps
- 2003 · W211 E-Class
- Electro-transparent roof
- 2002 · Maybach 62
- Linguatronic voice control
- 1996 onward
- Electric parking brake
- 2000s production
Epilogue
The viral car that wasn’t new.
In the early 2000s, chain emails circulated photos of the F 200 under the subject line “The New Benz” and called it an SCL600. Snopes had to explain that the car was real — just not for sale, and already several years old. The original still sits in the Mercedes-Benz Museum’s Fascination of Technology section. The stick never replaced the wheel. Almost everything around it did.