Premiere 125 years ago
When Gottlieb Daimler presented his first truck in 1896, still on wooden wheels with iron tires, the world had not been waiting for this vehicle. There were no buyers in Germany, and in England, where the vehicle finally found a customer, a crew member still had to run ahead with a red flag to warn traffic. And yet this four-hp vehicle with a two-cylinder rear engine and a displacement of 1.06 liters, called the Phoenix, was the initial spark for a success story in freight transport. However, the Phoenix had little to do with a real truck: strictly speaking, it was a converted horse-drawn goods wagon of the kind that was pulled through the streets by horses at the time Its chassis had transversely mounted leaf springs at the front and coil springs at the rear. 2021 is a special year at Daimler Trucks and Buses: Gottlieb Daimler presented the first truck in 1896, followed in 1951 by Otto Kässbohrer with the first bus in self-supporting design - Setra - while five years earlier the first Unimog was already driving as a prototype in rough terrain.