Here are a few pic of old Mercedes Classics:
What is the name of the tan/brown VW-like car?
Searched for Mercedes beetle lookalike:
It’s actually a 170H. Here’s a three-quarter view of the same car (they sold in tiny numbers.)
In fact, here’s an article on the three cars pictured:
Yeah, 170. I was looking at the wrong car thinking the 170 was actually a Beetle.
Have Mercedes-Benz vehicles always been synonymous with luxury, high-end vehicles, like they are today? Did they ever produce mass-market, passable (but not particularly noteworthy) vehicles for buyers at lower price points?
In Germany they mass produce many vehicles at lower price points. Most of the taxis in major cities in Germany are Mercedes Benz.
They make lots of commercial vehicles too. Vans, trucks, and whatever you’d call the Unimog. Plus there’s the A-class and C-class which are certainly mass market vehicles even if they’re more expensive than most competitors.
Good grief, how did you do that? Nice catch.
Google image search.
Yes, Mercedes in Germany and Europe is more like GM than, say, BMW. A full-spectrum car and truck maker. Since they established here as a luxury brand, they have been careful to guard it, only rarely bringing lower-end cars and the occasional non-car to market in the US.
These days, Benz’s car division is pretty much all luxury cars. Even their A, B, and C classes which are smaller cars are still sufficiently swanky that you’d probably call them luxury cars. In the past, though, they also had a bit of a niche making cars that weren’t particularly luxurious but which cost more because they were overbuilt and held up a lot better than other cars of the era. Things like your classic European taxi Benzes like the old 240D’s and E300’s which had spartan interiors and unbelievably slow engines, but would run forever and take all sorts of abuse. That niche sort of relied on everyone else’s cars falling apart, though, and as the quality of cars in general has massively improved over the last couple decades the overbuilt non-luxury car market has mostly ceased to exist.