Stuttgart Mercedes-Benz Museum | Witnessing the Changes of Time

The Mercedes-Benz Museum is located on the banks of the Neckar River, and as soon as you enter Stuttgart, you can feel the atmosphere of this automotive industrial city, with the quietly flowing river, the factories along the riverbank, and the somewhat old streets of the city, some sections of which are under maintenance. The museum covers a large area, with parking spaces along the road and an indoor parking garage, making it a gathering place for tourists. It was Sunday, and although it was already afternoon when we arrived, the queue for tickets still stretched to the entrance, and the staff handed out bags of gummy bears to the children, suggesting that one parent could queue while the children could go to the children's center next to the shop on the basement floor to do crafts and draw. When entering with a ticket, the elevator with tracks on the wall has a very futuristic feel, going straight to the top floor, which is also the starting point for the museum tour. The entire museum is displayed floor by floor according to the order of automotive development, with historical events of each era and car-related introductions on the left wall, and the passage spirals down, with each floor showcasing Mercedes-Benz cars from each era. Just a few steps away from each floor is an annex, where there are various unseen Mercedes cars, fire engines, postal vehicles, snowplows, buses... The car in the photo with the glass cabinet at the back is the one used for the Pope's travels, which needed to be both visible to the public and safe. There is also a collection of Mercedes brand peripheral products from the past, from tableware to records, from toys to clothing, from records to snowboards, which is particularly interesting and shows that these products were probably released during Mercedes' most dazzling era. I am not a car fan, nor a Mercedes owner, but after a tour of the museum, combined with the cars in the exhibition hall and the historical introductions on the walls, the further down I walked, the more I felt that Mercedes was disappearing, with the large-scale industrial production and capitalists wanting maximum profit, those complicated, luxurious, and exquisite Mercedes designs seem to be slowly vanishing. This is not just a change in one car product, but a feeling after visiting many museums, even products like chocolate, where the diverse and artistic packaging has been replaced by boring, low-cost, uniform packaging. After visiting the racing floor, the last display is about future designs and electric cars, and really... personally, I felt a bit of an anticlimax after the visit. Developing countries, let's just say China here, German car companies have been making easy money with China's development for many years, and they were the ones who proposed energy conservation and carbon reduction to curb the industrial development of developing countries, but they didn't expect China to develop the entire electric car industry chain. In the field of electric cars, they are hard-pressed to surpass in the short term and have lost their competitiveness, if not for the common people's trust and admiration for BBA, they would not immediately lose the market. With Germany being de-industrialized in recent years, I wonder if it's time for a new era to shift. The world changes too fast!