After a fairly fraught first part of the year I've finally got round to taking some time off work and on the spur of the moment have just booked a flight and hotel in Stuttgart for 3 days to go and wander round the Mercedes and Porsche museums. Any tips or advice from those who've been?
Mbworld is great.. Defo a good way to kill a few hours... The sindelfingen plant is not too far and is awesome if you can get a tour.......not done the Porsche tour yet but plan to.
Merc museum is great - allow most of a day unless you push on at pace. Porsche museum is also good, but I found the audiobook got annoying after a while. They kept carefully trying to insinuate Porsche were first at this, that and everything else - stuff that I knew absolutely to be untrue.
I drove there last year, was a great trip! We stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn Neckar Park. Go early in the morning to see MB museum as you get a bunch of coaches full of tourists who start pouring in late morning or early afternoon. It makes it harder to take good pics of the cars on display and it gets pretty rammed. If you want to see the factory, you need to make advanced bookings. Connected to it on the ground floor is MB dealership. If you get a chance, go on the second floor there is the staff/customers car park building towards the back. You'll see some really rare and tasty AMG cars parked up, including some V12 AMG models. Just next to the entrance to the car park (on the second floor) is a nice small cafe, they do some great sandwiches! There is also a sports bar/restaurant called Palm Beach Stuttgart, in between Porsche Arena and Hilton Inn. Walk up the stairs where you see the big Bosch sign, and you'll see palm trees and tables. The food there is really good and the atmosphere in the evenings is great! We ended up going there quite a bit! Porsche museum is a beautiful building, very artistic. Lots of cars on display and again it does get busy. There is a restaurant inside it, but it was pretty pricey for what it was. Also, they have a private library upstairs where they keep the records of all porsches build data and designs, they have a lot of info on the MB 500E too and you need permission to go inside it. Once your done, opposite the building is a Porsche dealership, they have some nice cars in there!. Have a stroll around the site too, as the Porsche factory is pretty big. You'll see a big bridge connecting one building to another, thats where they transfer the shells of the car from assembly to be painted in the opposite building (or the opposite way!). Hope that helps.
The museum is great as above posts say IF you appreciate historical vehicles. Most of the content is centered around the old history of Mercedes but it is still very a very impressive museum and well worth the visit. My own opinion is that the factory tours are much more impressive. Just the fact that the factory area is 3 times as large as Monaco and still all parts supplied by other manufactures only arrives to the factory are just 3 hours before assembly due to lack of storage space :-o Take a guess on how many combinations of seats that are available for the S-Class? I'll get you won't be near the correct number - 920.000
Thanks for all the advice, I'll definitely go early then. I've allowed a day each so I can take my time. I don't think I'll be able to book a factory tour at this late notice, but in any case I'm more interested in the older, historical models of each marque. I'm quite excited about it now, I love last minute plans, plus 2 days walking round looking at cars and drinking German beer in the evenings is my idea of a treat :-D
We went to the M-B museum a few years back ... some pictures here: http://www.mbclub.co.uk/forums/events/29221-mercedes-museum-stuttgart-pictures-trip-last-week.html The Sinsheim museum is less than an hour away and pretty much on the route there. That's also well worth a visit, particularly if you're into the 'classics': http://www.mbclub.co.uk/forums/general-discussion/74857-pictures-sinsheim-auto-technik-museum.html http://www.mbclub.co.uk/forums/ot-o...-sinsheim-auto-technik-museum-aeroplanes.html
Thanks I didn't know about the Sinsheim museum, I fancy going there as well. Love the Batmobile Maybach! Hopefully get enough time tomorrow to try and put some sort of plan together, I fly in Tues morn and out Fri morn so a bit of a whistle stop tour
Try Culver Eck Brady, just off Koenig Strasse and brew their own on site. Served in small 0.2l glasses you will drink more than you think. Good job they mark you "deckel" or beer mat with the number
At the risk of sounding cultural, you might want to check out the art gallery in Stuttgart. You may have seen it before in a Rover ad on TV - Rover 800 fastback advert - YouTube Enjoy Jon
Thanks for all the advice everyone, had a great time! I actually ended up staying in the town of Esslingen on the periphery of Stuttgart, a really beautiful old place with great pubs, beer and people . The swim in the old art deco swimming pool fed by springs was great too, highly recommended. The museums were great, I got to the Porsche museum about 9.30 and it already looked busy, but I was glad to find that most of the people were in large groups, so all I had to do was wait until they moved on to the next car and I had all the time and space I needed. Wonderful place and I spent 3hrs there examining all the cars in great detail and photographing. When you leaned into the old race cars they had been left with all the dents and scrapes and still smelled of oil and petrol, fantastic. I ended up having plenty of time so decided I'd do the Mercedes museum the same day and was pleased to find it eerily empty, there were no more than 10 people in the entire building and I quite often found myself having an entire floor to myself which was great, I spent ages just going round each car, my favourites being the gullwing SL and the superb, swoopy red 500 roadster from the 30s. You don't realise just how massive some of these cars are til you walk round them. Again, a thoroughly enjoyable experience, though the staff weren't as helpful or friendly as in the Porsche museum, apart from the lovely girl in the coffee shop. Again, 3 hrs so it's certainly viable to do both in a day, I really would have struggled to use more time, though I didn't do factory tours at either plant. I'll post flickr links to the 100s of pics I took when I get round to it rather than flood the forum, but in the meantime how about this baby :-D What you can't see in the photo are badges on the front and rear, no not AMG....... Maserati!
Photo links for anyone interested Edit: Argh it's too long since I've used this sort of forum software and can't remember how to post URLs properly, if you're interested just go to http://Flickr.com/andyswallow, the car museum pics are the only public ones
