The year was 1933. It was a cold autumn night at the Gaggenau works of Daimler-Benz, Germany. A few development engineers had been working on a nightmare of an assignment and a couple of them had not slept for days continuously. Finally, they had managed to shoehorn a leviathan of a six cylinder diesel engine, displacing 3800cc and developing 80 bhp, into a test-rig. Volume One of the official ‘Mercedes’ book is politically correct when it says ‘the tests showed that the transmission was being hammered by the vibration of the engine.’ ‘A battle has been lost, but not the war,’ the book adds.
Well it’s easy for us to imagine what would have happened as that (relatively) high compression diesel was started up. In all probability, it would have run well for a while. Then, as the test-rig was made to run faster, it would have vibrated violently enough to shatter the gearbox casing and then thrown sharp metal objects at the startled engineers. I don’t know whether the test-rig exploded or not, but somehow I get black and white images of a few disappointed and all blacked-out Germans looking at each other and wondering what went wrong.
Three years later, the Daimler-Benz pavilion at the Berlin Motor Show had an unlikely star – the world’s first diesel powered passenger car, the 260D. Nestling under its hood was a smaller, four cylinder engine that displaced 2600cc to produce 45 bhp. It could manage a top speed of 94 kph at a time when the fastest production Mercedes, the 540 Kompressor could only manage 170 kph. That autumn night had taught the engineers a lesson or two.
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