Carl Benz (1844–1929), born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant in Mühlburg near Karlsruhe, brought an engineering background shaped by training at the Karlsruhe polytechnical school and work across several mechanical enterprises. His first factory venture, the Iron Foundry and Mechanical Workshop launched with August Ritter in 1871, nearly failed before his fiancée Bertha Ringer's dowry rescued it by buying out Ritter's share. The couple married on 20 July 1872.
An earlier attempt to incorporate the business as Gasmotoren Fabrik Mannheim in 1882 ended unhappily when Benz received only five percent of shares and found his ideas ignored. He withdrew in 1883 and co-founded Benz and Cie with Rose and Eßlinger. The new company initially produced static gas engines, but its commercial success gave Benz the means to pursue his central ambition: a horseless carriage.
The vehicle Benz created used wire wheels, a four-stroke engine of his own design mounted between the rear wheels, coil ignition, evaporative cooling, and chain drive to each rear wheel via a counter-shaft with differential. A public demonstration in 1885 ended in a collision with a wall, but Benz refined the design and filed his patent on 29 January 1886. He first drove the Motorwagen publicly in Mannheim on 3 July 1886 and received patent number 37345 in November 1886. In the late summer of 1888 he began selling the vehicle commercially — the first automobile offered for sale in history.
In August 1888 Bertha Benz, reportedly without her husband's prior knowledge, drove a production Model 2 from Mannheim to Pforzheim — a journey of approximately 104 kilometres — to visit her mother, taking sons Eugen and Richard. Along the route she sourced fuel from pharmacies, repaired faults herself, and devised brake lining by having a shoemaker nail leather onto the brake blocks. She telegraphed Carl upon arrival. The journey provided the public proof of the automobile's practicality that advertising could not. The Bertha Benz Memorial Route commemorating the trip was officially designated as a route of industrial heritage in 2008.
The demand for static internal combustion engines drove rapid expansion. By 1889 Benz and Cie employed 50 people; by 1899 it had 430, and produced 572 automobiles that year — making it the largest automobile manufacturer in the world. The company became a joint-stock corporation in 1899 with the arrival of Friedrich von Fischer and Julius Ganß on the board.
Models of the period included the four-wheel Victoria (1893–1900), priced accessibly for its time, and the Velo (1894–1902), sometimes cited as the first car produced in genuine mass quantities with over 1,200 built. The Velo competed in what is often called the world's first automobile race, the 1894 Paris to Rouen, where Émile Roger finished fourteenth. In 1895 Benz designed the first truck and the first motor buses with internal combustion engines.
In 1896 Benz received a patent for the flat engine — a horizontally opposed cylinder arrangement that simultaneously balanced opposing pistons. This design later appeared in Porsche and Subaru road cars and in BMW motorcycles.
From early in their history automobile manufacturers recognized racing as a tool for publicity and development. Benz and Cie participated from the start: a Benz Velo ran in the 1894 Paris to Rouen race, and later investment in dedicated racing machinery followed as competition among manufacturers intensified.
The most dramatic result of this approach was the Blitzen Benz of 1909, built at the Mannheim factory. Its 21.5-litre, 150 kW (200 hp) engine powered the bird-beaked vehicle to a land speed record of 226.91 km/h (141.00 mph) at Brooklands on 9 November 1909, set by French driver Victor Hémery — a speed said to exceed any contemporary aeroplane, train, or automobile, and one that stood for a decade. The car toured several countries, including the United States, to demonstrate the record.
Benz also produced the Tropfenwagen — a teardrop-shaped mid-engine car with aerodynamic bodywork — which appeared at the 1923 European Grand Prix at Monza, prefiguring design ideas that would not become mainstream for decades.
Competition from Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, whose new Mercedes cars designed by Wilhelm Maybach began capturing customers and publicity from 1902, forced Benz and Cie to respond. After the board hired French designers without consulting Benz, he announced his retirement from design management in January 1903, though he remained as a board director. His sons Eugen and Richard also left in 1903, with Richard returning in 1904 as passenger vehicle designer.
The German economic crisis of the early 1920s hit both Benz and Cie and DMG severely. In 1924 the two companies signed an "Agreement of Mutual Interest" covering joint standardization and marketing. On 28 June 1926 they completed a full merger, forming Daimler-Benz, with all automobiles henceforth badged as Mercedes-Benz. Carl Benz remained on the Daimler-Benz board until his death on 4 April 1929 in Ladenburg, aged 84. Bertha Benz continued to reside in their home there until her own death in 1944.
Benz and Cie's direct contribution to motorsport history is rooted in those early racing appearances and the Blitzen Benz land speed record, but its broader legacy is foundational: the Patent-Motorwagen of 1886 established the template for the modern automobile, and the company's rapid growth proved that motorised personal transport could be industrialised. The merger that created Daimler-Benz united the two firms most responsible for bringing the automobile from invention to mass manufacture.