MERCEDES - BENZ
THE 1950s
The 170V W136
1947 – 1953
By Bernd S. Koehling
Copyright 2012 Bernd S. Koehling
Smashwords Edition
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CONTENT
The Cars
First of all I would like to thank you for having purchased this book and I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It is part of an e-book series that covers all cars produced by Daimler-Benz during the 1950s and 1960s.
The time was still a difficult for Daimler-Benz, as it slowly started to develop the business, which was less than five years after the war not an easy undertaking. Manpower was luckily available, but material was difficult to come by in sufficient quality and quantities. Daimler-Benz had been more fortunate than other German automotive companies, because their plants were all located in the western part of Germany. Other previously famous brands such as Horch, Adler, Audi or part of BMW were less lucky. Early in the fifties prewar styling was still predominant. And although a few companies such as Borgward in Bremen, Northern Germany worked already on more modern designs, Daimler-Benz made the wise decision not to test these waters too early and stick to the tried and tested designs that their customers were accustomed to for a few more years.
Late in the 1940s the 170V started as one of just a few luxury automobiles in Germany and when it was finally stopped in 1953 it had become a car for the upper middle class. Compared with the pre-war glory of a 540K, the 170 was by those standards a non-starter, an old warmed-up four-cylinder car dating back to the thirties. Yet it helped the company in one of its most crucial moments to regain badly needed confidence, not only within its own work force and customers but also with the banks.
March 2012
Bernd S. Koehling
MB 170V W136 VI (1950 – 1953)
MB 170D W136 VID (1950 – 1953)
Just a bit of chrome, no white walls, no frills. that's the way they were and that's the way many are today
In order to understand the cars of the early fifties, one has to get a feeling for the time the cars were born into. Although the war was already over for five years, European manufacturers still faced serious supply shortages and many cities that had suffered from heavy bomb raids during the war, still felt the burden of restructuring and rebuilding to pre-war capacities.
Car manufacturers in Britain could only receive sufficient amount of steel, if they were able to fulfil their export quotas, as the government needed foreign exchange. Car manufacturers in Germany had to wade through the rubble, the war had left them and had to realize that very few of them had enough equipment to start manufacturing at all. In this respect Daimler-Benz was fortunate that their large deep-drawing steel press for the 170V model in Stuttgart-Sindelfingen had survived bombing almost completely intact. Daimler-Benz would have preferred to produce also 300-series and even 500K motorcars again, as they thought most probably correctly, to have a sufficiently large enough customer base for such cars abroad. This would have helped to generate foreign exchange, which was needed for some raw material supply. They had the brainpower again working for the company, but there were no tools left for these larger cars. And money and material to have such tools produced, wasn’t available yet.