Mercedes Benz - the undisputed leader of luxury cars in India

If there is one company that could be credited with the invention of the automobile, it would have to be Mercedes, whose origins reach all the way back to the 1880s. Bertha Benz (the wife and business partner of automobile inventor Karl Benz) was the first person to drive an automobile over a long distance (which she completed in 1888).

In India, for years Mercedes has been synonymous with luxury cars. Mercedes means a lot more than just good cars in India. The three-pointed star, the leader in India's luxury-car space, is steadily climbing up the ladder in the overall automobile market as well. The oldest luxury-car maker in India, which sells as many as 22 models here including nine locally produced, is next only to Maruti Suzuki on product portfolio in this market.

The luxury space in India, which is just about 1% of the overall market, though offers fatter margins, allowing companies such as Mercedes to do better financially than most others in the mass car market.

Mercedes has the largest network among luxury carmakers, with 87 outlets. One of the big differentiator between Mercedes and other luxury carmakers is that, it has been able to draw buyers across segments, right from entry luxury cars to the top of the line AMG models, where it has more than half the market.

Mercedes has in the past few years become a barometer of the performance of the luxury vehicle space.

• Mercedes was the name of Emil Jellinek's daughter, who was a car racer and an active car dealer with DMG.
• Pope Francis was recently presented with a Mercedes-Benz M-Class based "Popemobile" complete with a waving booth. The Vatican has a history of using custom Mercedes-Benz vehicles to transport the Pope.
• Mercedes-Benz produced both a hybrid vehicle AND an electric vehicle in 1906!
• Adolf Hitler had a special Mercedes touring car with a special seat which could be raised up so that he could be more easily seen when he rode through the streets. Hitler's Mercedes-Benz cars only did three miles to the gallon because they were so heavily armoured.
• Mercedes-Benz was the first automobile manufacturer to offer a compact disc player as a factory option in 1984.
• Mercedes Built the World's First Self-Driving Car in the '80s! Thanks to some funding from the European Union, to the tune of €800 million, and a few years of development, Mercedes engineered an autonomous S-Class that drove itself from Munich, Germany to Copenhagen, Denmark and back in 1995. Along the way it hit speeds of up to 109 mph.
• According to daimler.com, the three pointed star symbolizes Daimler's ambition of universal transportation, "on land, on water and in the air" with Daimler's engines used not only in cars and trucks, but in airplanes and boats. The three-pointed star started appearing on the front on Daimlers from 1910 onward. The circle surrounding the star was added later in 1916.
• Mercedes made bicycles. A bicycle was sold under the Mercedes name in 1923. A typewriter was considered too, but never made it to production.
• Mercedes-Benz built a spaceship. Princess Vespa, along with her robotic handmaiden Dot Matrix (voiced by Joan Rivers), used her Mercedes-Benz 2001 SEL Limited Edition spaceship to escape planet Drudia, and an arranged marriage to Prince Vallium in the 1987 sci-fi epic, Spaceballs.
• he Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG supercar has exploding door hinges. The hinges are fitted with exploding bolts wired to go off milliseconds after a rollover is detected. The small explosion separates the door from the frame, allowing for an easy exit.
• Mercedes now has a truck that can drive itself. Using lessons that started with the autonomous car from 1995, Mercedes has now brought the same technology to trucking making the Mercedes-Benz Future Truck 2025.

What is special about a luxury car, especially a Mercedes, is that, it doesn't lose value even when it changes ownership. Hence, there is a huge market for used luxury cars in India. But when it comes to a certified used Mercedes Benz dealership, the most trusted name is Autohanger Advantage which has a 30 year association with Mercedes Benz and is committed to meeting all the needs of their clients.

Autohangar Advantage in addition to Mercedes-Benz also deals in BMW, Audi and other luxury cars.