Karl Benz was born in 1844 in Southern Germany.
At an early age, he was fascinated by machines and formed Benz and Cie. in 1871. In 1886, they built a motorized tricycle equipped with a four stroke engine.
Also Gottlieb Daimler, another inventor from Southern Germany introduced a motorized carriage. Since Benz's invention had a chassis, and was designed from scratch, he was credited as the inventor of the first automobile. In the early 1900's Benz and Daimler were competitors, but entered into a mutual agreement after WW1 and in June 28, 1926 they merged and became Daimler-Benz. Their mutual agreement was valid until the year 2000, and let them sell their own products under their own brand names. The official name: Mercedes Benz was born. When manufacturing cars, they focus on luxury, safety, and precision engineering. With a package like this, you can expect a hefty price. Well now that the luxury car industry has become very competitive, their prices must be. Mercedes currently has 13 different classes of cars to cater to their customers needs. For those of you that have a little more to spend, Mercedes Benz has teamed up with McLaren and produced a supercar called the SLR McLaren. Although this supercar comes with a hefty price tag ($495,000) it is equipped with a Supercharged 5.5 Liter V-8 engine giving it 626 horsepower. 0-60 mph can be achieved in only 3.5 seconds, and has a top speed of 209 MPH.
In 1998, Daimler Benz and Chrysler formed a strategic alliance, but later sold Chrysler to Cerberus Management in late 2007. Daimler now only holds a 19.9% stake of Chrysler and Cerberus the remaining share.
