This friday we had our betriebsausflug. A department outing. I’m not sure if this is a German thing or an SAP thing, but I can’t help thinking of school outings for grown ups. A fine thing indeed. We drove down the motorway to Stuttgart, visited the Mercedes Benz museum and then had a guided tour of the Weissenhofstiedlung. (more in a later post on that)
The museum is fabulous. I was flabbergasted that in 1909 Benz built a car with over 200bhp that had a top speed of over 230 kms. But more than anything I was captivated by the beauty of good design.
I wish I’d had a real car design expert with me. (the gearhead in me enjoys the metacool blog) but the audio service at the museum was pretty good.
I learnt something about the 300SL that I didn’t know. The gullwing doors were an innovative answer to a challenge that the new chassis design had created. The race car was built to be light and strong with a new tubular construction form, but the structure made it impossible to add a normal door, this would have sacrificed the torsonal strength.
So the designers came up with this.
Mercedes-Benz needed a lot of convincing to turn the racing car into a production model, but it is a good thing they did.
September 10, 2007 at 12:47 pm
[...] Thomas Otter ← Good design is beautiful. [...]
December 12, 2008 at 10:47 pm
[...] the finest collection of vintage and significant cars as you will find anywhere, other than at the other Benz museum in Stuttgart. It is my sad affliction to think about software design at the weekends, and the Benz museum [...]
December 13, 2008 at 8:30 am
[...] the finest collection of vintage and significant cars as you will find anywhere, other than at the other Benz museum in Stuttgart. It is my sad affliction to think about software design at the weekends, and the Benz museum [...]