'Father of the 190' recalls key Mercedes moments

History moves quickly and seldom are the times when we can hear first-hand accounts of historic times from more than half a century ago.

Werner Breitschwerdt was a boy of 12 in Stuttgart when the Second World War broke out. He survived it and went on to become one of those who made a major impact in Germany's "economic miracle."

Breitschwerdt, now 82, visited Toronto recently on his way home from wintering in Florida, and spent some time talking about Mercedes' post-war rebirth.

He held the highest office at Daimler-Benz AG in the 1980s, when the company's sales rose by more than 60 per cent. But he was always a practical engineer at heart.

At Mercedes-Benz he is known as the "father of the 190," the auto maker's first compact sedan in 1982, which lead directly to the C-Class of which several generations and variations have sold more than six million units.

Breitschwerdt and his engineers gave the compact class its big-car comfort with engineering innovations such as multilink independent rear suspension.

After stepping down as chairman he remained a member of the supervisory board of Daimler-Benz AG from 1988 until 1993.

Vaughan: You survived the war and were turning 18 when it ended. Did you have much hope then?

Breitschwerdt: The older men died in the war, so there was a hole which we filled. If you have nothing - nothing to eat, no clothes, nowhere to live - you have to work. You have to start to make stores, to build factories and houses. We worked from Monday to Saturday and on Sunday we went to church ...

We knew nothing but to work; in Germany then, there were no other possibilities. I began my studies in 1947 and I ended in 1952. We never thought to have tennis or golf, we had to work.

I'm surprised there was a university to attend.

We had to build the university before we could go to the university. We had to spend half a year constructing it before we could begin. It was a hard time but it was a beautiful time.

In 1945 we had no material. We made cooking utensils out of old helmets. But I graduated with a master's of engineering and went to work at Daimler in 1953.

What cars were they building then?

At the beginning they built the 170V, a prewar design. During the war it was strictly forbidden to design new cars but secretly our designers were working on one.

It was the Mercedes W120 Ponton and in 1953 we began to build it. Our marketing people said they could never sell this car because the customers want to have big fenders.

But our CEO said, if marketing people say they cannot sell this car then it will be a big success.

And after, the 120 Mercedes, cars got bigger and bigger. Why did you think a smaller Mercedes was needed in the late 1970s?

One thing is we wanted to get younger customers and another is that in the United States they passed a law about fuel consumption and we only had bigger cars.

We considered buying a company that built small cars but we looked and said, no, they're nothing like Mercedes-Benz, we'll have to make our own small Mercedes.

Some of my colleagues said that's impossible. But I said, we can make a small car and when you go inside it you should not be able to tell if you are in an S Class or the middle class or the baby Mercedes. And we wanted to have a car with the same safety features as our big cars.

In those days size meant safety. How did you engineer big-car safety into it?

We had been working on safety for many years. I remember when we made the first crash test. It was very difficult to make the car accelerate against the wall. One of my engineers said, 'Oh I'll drive it, it's only going 50 kilometres an hour.'

I said, 'Look at the data - there will be 30 Gs or 40 Gs [times normal gravity] when it decelerates as it hits the wall.' He sat down and said, 'I cannot do that.'

We got a winch that had been used to launch gliders and made a hole through the wall and attached the cable to the car and pulled it into the wall. That was the first crash test in the 1950s.

In the 1960s we made a water rocket to drive the car into the wall. We did this with trucks, too. We were testing the crumpling zones.

We could have made the cars heavier and stiffer to protect people inside, but that wouldn't help the people in the other car that collided.

You say there were people in the company opposed to developing a small car.

Yes, and it was important to change the minds of the dealers, too. You had to tell them, that's not a small car, that's a real Mercedes.

You get a good ride with a car weighing 2,000 kilograms, but to get that with a car that weighs 1,100 kg, it's very difficult and we worked for years on it.

We needed a new rear axle and finally we developed the multilink independent rear suspension.

The 190 was the first to have it and now it is in all our cars. The 190 was profitable after the first year.

Did your engineering background make you a better chairman?

As an engineer you always have to look for the money. I say, what you can do in innovation, you don't need in money. If you have a lot of people you have a lot of ideas - but ideas are not innovations.

You need leaders who help turn ideas into innovation. If you have a very good team, it means not so much time and not so much money.