Cars
Broken Dreams: Mercedes C111. A Laboratory for Tomorrow
The Mercedes C111, an experimental car from the late 1960s, showcased cutting-edge innovation with Wankel engines, record-breaking diesel performance, and futuristic design, but it remained a laboratory for tomorrow instead of reaching mass production.
The end of the 60s was marked by great technological innovations and achievements for humanity, such as the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The period was also a particularly fertile one for cars, with considerable experimentation happening among the manufacturers at the time. After shelving the SLX project, the new board at Mercedes gave the green light to a series of experimental cars to develop new technical solutions. The code name within the company was C101, later changed to C111 to avoid legal disputes with Peugeot who had registered and patented the three-digit acronyms with a zero in the middle for its models.
The first tests began in 1969 in Germany, under the direction of Rudolf Uhlenhaut – the creator of the 300SL – on the tracks of Untertürkheim and Hockenheim, with the first prototype equipped with a curious aluminium body just over a metre high from the ground, but above all a three-rotor Wankel engine, a solution that at that time seemed to have a great future after it appeared in the NSU Spider in 1964.
