Sport Cars in Stuttgart
Last week I went to Stuttgart to see the Porsche and Mercedes museums. I’m not a massive car guy, but I do think that they’re cool and it’s definitely something I’d be interested in getting into.
I liked the Porsche museum a lot, it was more of a car showcase than a museum about the company, but they did have a lot of cool displays. There were a lot of models about how the cars worked, such as a cutaway of their famous Boxer engines, or a model of how a torsion bar suspension worked.
A lot of the cars there were for endurance races. I did not know that Porsche was such a prolific racing company, including 19 Le Mans wins (Porsche AG, n.d.). Probably the coolest car was the Porsche 956, which they had attached to the ceiling. Apparently, if the car reached 200 miles per hour then it would be able to drive on the ceiling.
Probably my favorite part was the interactive section where you could press on the gas pedal of different Porsche models and their engine sounds would play on the speaker. There was also a similar exhibit with the cars’ keys and their ignition sounds.
The Mercedes museum was definitely much more of a museum. There were plenty of cars of course, but there was a lot more about the history of the company, as well as descriptions of non-car events happening in the world to give some context about what was happening while these cars were being developed.
There were some cool cars at the Mercedes exhibit as well. They had a Pope-mobile and a couple of Mercedes’ F1 cars. There was also a cool exhibit where you pretended to be an F1 pitstop crew and you got times by how fast you could change the car’s tires.
Overall I would recommend the museums if you are in Stuttgart. Unfortunately there isn’t much else to do in Stuttgart, so unless you’re a fan of the cars, I wouldn’t really recommend dedicating a whole trip there. I only spent one night, and I felt like I had gotten everything out of the city that I wanted to.
– Robin
Porsche AG. (n.d.). Champions. Porsche Museum. Retrieved April 23, 2025, from https://www.porsche.com/international/aboutporsche/porschemuseum/successstorylemans/champions/
