Volkswagen - Mercedes

[Ted]

Probably you already know it, but I was surprised to read about the early relations between Daimler-Benz and the first Volkswagen cars. The car on the picture below is a modern reproduction of the original. But the point is, from the first test series of 30 VW cars, 29 were built by Daimler-Benz! The chassis/engines at the Unterturkheim plant and the the bodies at Sindelfingen.

[Des]

Yes I have read before that on these early Volkswagens the wheels were the same as the Mercedes 170V,
so I wonder what other parts would be the same as well?

[Harry Dee]

Well Ferdinand Porsche (who designed the Volkswagen Typ 1 aka the Beetle) worked for a good number of years (1923-32) as chief engineer at Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft and later Daimler-Benz. He much later went on to make the sports cars he is known for today, but even now the Porsche factory is located very close to the Mercedes-Benz one in Stuttgart.

At that time a lot of German manufacturers were interested in making rear-engined cars very much like how the Beetle then ended up to be. The Mercedes-Benz 130/150/170 H were designed and developed in the Ferdinand Porsche era, and between Mercedes-Benz and the Volkswagen, Porsche designed other very similar cars like the ones for Zündapp ("Porsche Typ 12") and NSU ("Porsche Typ 32").

When our good friend Adolf asked Porsche to design "the People's Car" (Volkswagen - Folk's wagon), it was no suprise he made it to be very much like his earlier work. If you want to put it not-so-kindly Ferdinand Porsche was sort of a one-hit-wonder; he kept reinventing the same concept of a car over and over again. 

-Harry

[CraigS]

And plagiarised the work of Tatra as well !