Mercedes-Benz is having a bit of a moment. From the auction last weekend of a 1954 Mercedes W 196 R ‘Stromlinienwagen’ racer for a record CDN$77 million; to an R107-gen Benz SL roadster-slash-hot-tub taking a star turn in the music video for Grammy winner Sabrina Carpenter’s hit “Espresso,” cars wearing the vaunted three-pointed star are in the spotlight almost everywhere you look.
You’ll find that’s true, too, if you head to the 2025 Canadian International Auto Show (CIAS) in Toronto next week, as the luxury automaker marks its return to the exposition after a five-year hiatus. There’ll be plenty of new Mercedes-Benzes on hand, sure, including a fully electric take on the iconic G-Wagen, but the perennial Cobble Beach Classics exhibit is also paying tribute to the German brand with a dazzling array of vintage examples.
“It’s a lot harder getting specific vehicles from a marque, in a sequence charting the evolution, rather than getting [a variety of] performance cars or muscle cars, which gives you a lot of flexibility,” explains Rob McCleese, chair of the Cobble Beach Concours d’Elegance, which runs the CIAS feature. “And then being Mercedes, they didn’t make a whole lot of these cars in the first place.”
Nevertheless, McCleese and his team have managed to collect eight incredible Benzes to display this year, most of them local to Ontario, and they do indeed chronicle the carmaker’s evolution, starting with its very first vehicle, the 1886 Benz Patent Motorwagen—okay, well, a replica of one.
Widely heralded as the very first automobile, the Motorwagen is a three-wheeled two-seater driven by Karl Benz’s single-cylinder four-stroke engine. Its three-quarters-of-a-horsepower output doesn’t translate into a whole lot of get-up-and-go, but that didn’t keep Benz’s wife Bertha from undertaking the world’s first-ever automobile road trip – an ambitious 105-km jaunt – in one in 1888.
The original Patent Motorwagen is long gone, but there are more than a few replicas around; Mercedes-Benz itself commissioned the U.K.’s John Bentley Engineering to build a run of about 100 copies to commemorate the car’s centenary roughly 35 years ago. The replica at the CIAS comes out of the Lane Motor Museum in Tennessee, and is fully functional, though the drivetrain behaves a little “quirky, shall we say,” notes McCleese.
The Lane Museum also offered McCleese its 1935 Mercedes-Benz 130H, a car he’d never heard of before; after looking up some images, he realized just how, ahem, unconventional the thing looked. Benz made only about 4,000 examples of the rear-engined experimental auto, and while a commercial flop, some of its engineering innovations influenced later cars like the Volkswagen Beetle.
The diminutive 130H makes for a stark contrast to the 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540K Sport Tourer you’ll see a few feet away, an imposing, long, and low roadster on loan from the Gilmore Car Museum in Michigan. This particular example is the only one remaining of two built, and the secret to its survival lies in its original owner’s decision to brick it up in the basement of his house in Dresden, Germany to spare it from the bombings that rocked that city during the Second World War. It stayed hidden behind those walls some 60 years before it was finally unearthed.
While you won’t see one of Mercedes’ iconic “gullwing” 300SL coupes in Toronto – there’s only about 10 of the things in Canada – McCleese’s team did manage to secure a 1960 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Roadster, the car’s drop-top successor. The gorgeous blue-grey convertible may very well be the crowd favourite at CIAS, rivalled only by the 2015 Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT Final Edition. Both come out of Ontario collections, and the latter even competed in the Cobble Beach Concours d’Elegance last year.
A newer AMG bookends the modern flank of the display, specifically a 2021 Mercedes-Benz AMG GT Black Series “P-One Edition,” one of only 275 made, and of only 24 in North America. The P-One specials were reserved exclusively for Mercedes-Benz enthusiasts who’d reserved one of the marque’s AMG Project One hypercars—like Lauren Mendelson out of Michigan. Mendelson is “a total car girl,” grins McCleese, and she absolutely “loves this car” and its hand-painted three-point-star livery. We’re sure after its turn under the lights at the Cobble Beach Classics display, she won’t be the only one. Mercedes-Benz is having a bit of a moment after all.
The Cobble Beach Classics Tribute to Mercedes-Benz exhibit will be hosted on Level 100 in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre’s North Building; and the Canadian International Auto Show itself is set to run February 14 to 23 this year. And if any of the above piqued your interest, you might want to check out the Cobble Beach Concours d’Elegance in September. The event celebrated its 10th year in 2024.