100 Years of Competition: BMW vs Mercedes-Benz

As BMW celebrates its 100 year anniversary, they prove how strong a company they really are. It is very impressive for any company to reach this milestone and BMW should be proud. The history of the brand has not been easy. They’ve experienced a lot of hurdles in the past including starting at the very bottom, immediately being banned after WWII, and then some. However, they still emerged to be one of the largest automotive manufacturers in history. It is also interesting to note though that BMW’s main competition, Mercedes-Benz, might be able to claim even more than what BMW has accomplished.

Porsche and Mercedes-Benz have greeted BMW for this important birthday though marketing campaigns. The message is this: “It’s been good competing with you for these 100 years, let’s hope for 100 more”. This was a respectful gesture and it showed that the automakers are sport in competing with each other. Mercedes-Benz, well, they decided to be a little competitive by saying: “Thanks for 100 years of competition. The 30 years before that were a little dull.” This indirectly says that Mercedes-Benz is actually 30 years older than BMW. In fact, Karl Benz, one of the founders of Mercedes-Benz, is actually largely credited with inventing the automobile.

Since the humble beginnings of BMW in Germany, they have been rivals with Mercedes-Benz. They just basically tried to beat each other all the time. This was a nice and friendly competition but it was largely the best thing that’s happened in the automobile history of Germany because so many brilliant cars have resulted because of their desire to beat one another.

It was in the 1950’s that things started to become more intense. Mercedes-Benz developed its 300SL Gullwing and it was the very first production car to feature fuel injection. BMW followed suit with the 507 Roadster which was one of the most beautiful cars ever made but it put BMW in a temporary set-back.

BMW bounced back in the 1960’s and practically invented the small sport sedan with the 2002. This then paved the way to spawn the very first European production car to feature turbocharging, the 2002 Turbo.

BMW shocked the world further in 1972 with the 1602e. It was one of the world’s first electric cars and was used at the Munich Olympics. This proves that BMW has been in the EV game longer than anyone else.

Then Mercedes-Benz invented anti-lock brakes, which BMW answered with the E30 BMW M3. Mercedes-Benz brought the first luxury SUV into the market, and BMW answered a few years later. BMW invented the first infotainment system, with iDrive which, which is now the gold-standard in infotainment systems. The rest is history.