Benz Victoria

1893 · Four Wheeled Car with Ackermann Steering · Work 245 of 1,871

Benz Victoria, 1893, Four Wheeled Car with Ackermann Steering

A Benz Victoria on a country road outside Mannheim, double pivot king pin steering linkage under the front axle, buttoned bench seat with folding hood, single horizontal engine at the rear.

What it was used for
The Victoria was the first four-wheeled motor car of Benz & Cie. in Mannheim and replaced the three-wheeled Patent Motor Car from 1893, alongside the four-seat Vis-à-Vis. In 1894 Theodor von Liebieg drove his Victoria 939 km from Reichenberg in Bohemia via Mannheim to Gondorf on the Moselle, with a side trip to Reims; the archive dates the trip to July but gives 22 August for the start of the return. According to the Mercedes-Benz archive the first version had 1,730 cc and 3 hp; by 1900 the engine had grown to 2,915 cc and 6 hp.
What was new
On 28 February 1893 Benz applied for a patent on a steering device with steering circles tangential to the wheels (DRP 73515, issued 14 March 1894; elsewhere the Mercedes-Benz archive also gives 73151 and 73715). The front wheels swivelled individually on stub axles instead of turning the whole axle on a turntable. The principle itself was not new: Munich court coachbuilder Georg Lankensperger had developed stub-axle steering for carriages in 1816, and his agent Rudolph Ackermann patented it in England in 1818 (GB 4212). What exactly Benz's claims cover could not be checked here. The novelty was the transfer to the motor car, not the steering geometry. The twist: the breakthrough came not with the Victoria but with the cheaper Velo of 1894, of which about 1,200 were built up to 1901.

Connections

Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.

  1. Follows fromBenz Patent-Motorwagen1886Benz built the motor car as a three-wheeler because at first he could not solve the steering of a four-wheeled car (Stadtmuseum Karlsruhe). The Deutsches Museum states that from 1893 Benz vehicles were given double-pivot steering and ran on four wheels; according to Kulturgut Mobilität it was realised first in the Victoria and the Vis-à-Vis.Source: Stadtmuseum Karlsruhe, Objekt im Fokus: Benz Patent-Wagen · Deutsches Museum: Eine Ikone der Automobilgeschichte wird 140 · Initiative Kulturgut Mobilität: Benz Motor-Velociped

Further reading