The Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven Concept Is A Strange Tribute To The Classic C111 Prototypes

Mercedes Benz Vision 111 Topshot
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Over the past decade or so, really pretty supercars have grown hard to find. Every new Lamborghini looks like a caricature, every new Pagani grows increasingly ornate, every new McLaren looks like every other McLaren, and even the C8 Corvette just looks off from certain angles. Will the Germans come and save us? From the looks of things, that’s not likely. This is the Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven, an all-electric tribute to the C111 prototypes of the 1970s that really stretches the definition of a tribute. While its styling is confounding, it holds some serious promise beneath the oddly retro-influenced skin.

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The problem with retro cues is that we’re so accustomed to them that we’re starved for truly new visuals. Most people don’t want retro-look mobile phones, retro-look television sets, or retro-look laptops. Offering straight-up nostalgia bait is just giving into cultural compression. We’ve been running on borrowed ‘80s nostalgia for absolute ages, to the point where two new generations of human beings have grown up, gone to school, started careers, wed, bred, and in some cases, even divorced, all before mainstream nostalgia has truly moved on from an era that, as our resident designer explained, was shit if your dad didn’t attend Eton. If the 20-year cycle was a constant, we’d all be watching That 2000s Show and Taking Back Sunday would fall under the Classic Rock umbrella.

While BMW seems content to reminisce on the ‘80s with i Vsion Dee whilst wandering about Paul Wall’s grille emporium searching for hardware to go on its latest models, Mercedes is going even further back to a decade that nobody really wants to re-live. We’re talking about the 1970s, the decade of questionable leadership, questionable substances, and questionable films. The Vision One-Eleven is meant as a reprise of the C111 prototypes of the late-’60s and the 1970s, and like many revivals of the ‘70s, doesn’t modernize all that well.

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The biggest culprit is the massively different set of proportions compared to the original. While the C111 is sleek and crisp, the Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven is blobby, with huge wheels and massive arches clashing with a wedge-like silhouette. It’s also so cab-forward that it looks more like a bootleg Stratos Zero than a C111 tribute. There are angles where it works and angles where it really doesn’t, appearing surprisingly tall for something just 46 inches high. Granted, Mercedes has tried to cheat the silhouette by making the skirts and diffuser black, which as anyone with a black-clad car knows, doesn’t really work. The result is a ‘70s concept performance car with the silhouette of a 2010s ArtCenter student project, all on stilts. All three of these concepts hold each other back to some degree in an unfortunate coalition of ideas.

Mercedes-Benz Vision 111 concept

However, that doesn’t mean the Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven is without nifty details. The gullwing doors are still cool as ever, and the front grille is a digital panel, a bit like a matrix display. In addition to providing forward lighting, this panel can be used to send messages to other drivers. Actually, knowing how rude people can be, that’s probably not a great idea, but it’s certainly an entertaining one.

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Power theoretically (this is a concept car, remember) comes from cylindrical cells with what Mercedes calls a novel chemistry feeding a YASA axial-flux motor for substantially-improved power density over the radial-flux motors in many EVs today. Mercedes claims that this axial-flux motor is three times more powerful by weight than radial-flux motors that are common today, and weight is a huge enemy of performance. It’s promising tech that we can expect to see in road cars of the future.

Mercedes Benz Vision 111 Interior 1

Things get substantially more interesting inside the Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven, where the recycled polyester dashboard trim means this thing’s actually made of old leisure suits. A rectangular steering wheel pays homage to Mercedes’ F1 efforts, while metallic seat upholstery makes quite the statement. Unsurprisingly, the face of the dashboard is one big dot display, which I find pleasing, but not for the reasons you might expect. Red-orange light doesn’t impede night vision as significantly as other colors, so consider this more of a practical benefit than anything.

Mercedes-Benz Vision 111

While I appreciate that Mercedes recognizes the C111 as part of its history, this Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven seems to come from the same barrel of rose-tinted disappointment as the reborn Lamborghini Countach. We’ll never have Bruno Sacco at the helm of Mercedes’ design team again, we’ll never have the relatively lax restrictions of prior decades again, and stretching old language over very different proportions more often than not creates a caricature rather than a tribute. [Editor’s Note: I, for one, dig Mercedes’ new concept car, especially from that front view -DT]. 

Mercedes Benz Sls Amg

So, how can retro be done right? Well, we don’t have to go far back to find out. The Mercedes-Benz SLS carefully borrowed styling elements from the 300 SL gullwing coupe, but it didn’t try to heavy-handedly slap familiar cues over very different proportions. It’s still a very cab-rearward coupe with an enormous hood and a short deck, but it doesn’t go overboard in a tribute to the past. There’s no chrome slathered on the bumper covers to remind us of a bygone time, no attempt at all to mimic the forward lighting signature of its ancestor, no fender blisters to throw off the modern styling language. The SLS is perfectly cohesive by the standards of 2010 without coming across as a pastiche.

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The Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven’s coolness comes in spite of its styling. It’s an electric supercar with a wild interior and the promise of axial-flux motor tech. While it’s not a particularly convincing tribute to the C111 series of prototypes, it’s still an enticing look at what the future holds. I say drop the retro for the next one and go nuts. Let the Mercedes-AMG ONE hypercar know that it has internal competition.

(Photo credits: Mercedes-Benz)

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30 thoughts on “The Mercedes-Benz Vision One-Eleven Concept Is A Strange Tribute To The Classic C111 Prototypes”

  2. You just know the designer had no idea where to go with the ordered retro c111 design so he asked his mom to pull his drawings of cars from the attic and went with one of those.

  3. It appears the wheels are meant to look like axial-flux motors and I do like their shape. However, maybe one day designers (side eye at Adrian) will realize that BIGGER wheels are not always better.

    1. Bigger wheels are an enemy to aerodynamic streamlining. The wheels shouldn’t be any bigger than they need to be for the vehicle to function according to its design purpose. I also loathe fragile rubberband tires that cost a fortune to replace. I like my tires to have meaty sidewalls. Further, the automakers are now moving to fragile aluminum rims that crack at the slightest pothole. I have a friend who used to weld/repair broken aftermarket rims on a frequent basis, and he had a steady supply of business because these rims are so cheaply built and poorly designed(on purpose, at that).

  5. The funny feeling I get when I see this, is that it might as well have been rendered by some teenage kid living in the Kaukasus mountains (or the suburbs of Villnius or in a rural outpost of Sichuan). Presenting a new concept like this is so uninspired and so predictable, when there’s basically so many kids out there that could have created something more outlandish or special. Give @the_kyza a week, and he would make something truly outrageous!
    If Mercedes really was serious about this, they should’ve presented it like a drivable mock-up (you’re a car manufacturer after all) like they did the first time around with the C-111, Wankel engine and all. Get those Axial-flux motors running (a seriously cool name by the way, a worthy successor to Wankel), throw out that crappy interior, install some carbon fibre bucket seat and see what it can do on the ‘ring!

        1. 20 years ago, I was floored when I saw the efficiency figures of his bike. It really got me thinking about how much “car” we really need to get from A to B. He used to be a contributor to the Electric Vehicle Discussion List back in the day and hardly anyone believed his efficiency figures, including a number of engineers.

          Cedric Lynch has saved tens of thousands of dollars using his vehicle versus a car sine he built it. The fact that it now has a 500 mile highway range on a tiny 13 kWh battery pack is encouraging.

          His bike was a partial inspiration for the sub-100 lb 3-wheeled microcar/”bicycle” I designed and built that gets me around at car speeds on less than 0.010 kWh/mile. Eventually, I’m going to have car-like amounts of horsepower and all-wheel-drive in that bastard, because hooning about is good fun. My dream is to be able to keep up with or even outright embarrass the local Hellcats being driven in my hood by people with 300 credit scores with no registration/tags/plates/licenses/insurance, that are always running from the cops who can’t catch them after they try to pull them over, in a vehicle that gets the equivalent of thousands of miles per gallon of gasoline in terms of efficiency. That is how you convince the lowest-common-denominator type of people to at least consider the new paradigm being presented.

          At the very least, modern automobiles should cut out a lot of features as standard(to reduce cost/save weight), as well as focus on aerodynamic streamlining(Cd values into the mid 0.1X region are possible without giving up what makes the vehicle practical to use and live with). Modern vehicles, for their amount of utility and performance at a given manufacturing cost, consume at least 2x as much energy as they need to. Case in point, Mercedes COULD be building a modern sports car with the CdA value of its nearly 50-year-old C111-III streamliner. A modern hybrid ICE powertrain in such a thing opens the door to a supercar that gets 80+ mpg, and a modern EV powertrain in such a thing opens the door to a supercar that only needs 0.150 kWh/mile or less, which in turn allows a smaller battery pack for a given weight, which in turn could bring back the days of nimble 2,500 lb supercars instead of today’s 4,000+ lb lardasses, without having to resort to exotic materials and production methods.

  7. I’m somewhat dumbfounded at the negative reception to this car both in the article and in the comments. I haven’t liked anything Mercedes has put out in the past 5 years, but this – this is fantastic.

    Yes it obviously borrows from the original but it isn’t a lazy copy like the Countach you mention – this is retrofuturism at its finest. Too bad that what makes it special would be a non-starter on a potential production car, but we can dream.

    1. Yeah, I don’t get the hate either.

      It does definitely have a few styling cues that nod to the old C-111 but it’s not bad at all. It’s quite a sleek looking concept car, IMO.

  8. My question is what is the drag coefficient? That was the entire point behind the design study in the 1970s. The C111-III had a Cd value of 0.19, and was able to exceed 190 mph on about 250 horsepower.

    I suspect this concept car doesn’t come close. Like so many other items put out by the automakers, it’s probably made to LOOK aerodynamic, without actually being such. All sizzle, no steak is the likely case. The massive wheels certainly won’t do it any favors.

  9. I’ve already formed a number of opinions on this car that I’m just not going to be able to shake.

    Overall, it’s alright. It’s a concept car, it’s a throwback, the exterior colour, accents and some design elements work. The rest, less so.

    The interior however, does not only nothing for me, but actively takes away from the rest of the car. Go look at the C111 interior and find a single element they’ve bothered to take inspiration from bar the side they stuck the steering wheel.

    The brightness is eye watering, the dash looks like what most of my morning looks like post hangover and that’s blurry as fuck and dumb to any recognition of depth perception, the seat material is maybe what an AI would throw back if you typed ‘C111 interior, but new and different and worse’ into the prompt bar and I wish I could reach through my screen and pull those big doors down and hide it all.

    It’s fine for what it is overall, but besides the promise of future drivetrain tech, it doesn’t excite me, they could’ve wheeled that part out on a table (they did) by itself without the concept car and I’d feel all the same.

  10. car is meh

    yasa power units appear tiny even when compared with those from lucid. should have been put to work in the one true cool mercedes which is of course the UNIMOG

  11. I… don’t hate it? I have to disagree with DT on the front, I think that’s the weakest angle. The “facial expression” just looks boggled to me, like somebody just asked the car its opinion about the tulip speculation bubble of the 1630s.
    But the sillhouette is very Cyberpunk 2077 which I kinda dig and I don’t hate the wheels either. The retrofuturism “remember 2001? No no, the movie!” interior however is… uh… it’s definitely a choice.

  13. Mercedes is getting dangerously close to considering LED badges a thing. Which would finally achieve Mercedes true dream, when even the badge can throw a code.

  14. A smaller wheel/tire package might provide space to reduce the cartoon fenders.

    Hmmm… Now I kind of want to see this with 15″ wheels and body colored dog dish caps.

  15. With the cab-forward design, they missed an opportunity to reference the C-113 as inspiration instead. But that wasn’t an in-house project, I don’t think.

  18. Frankly, this doesn’t ring any bells for me. I’ve seen the original C111, and saw/drove an Isdera Imperator, which was Eberhard Schultz’s take on the original. Both were sleek and efficient, and didn’t try so much to dazzle. Their dart shape was beautifully proportioned, clean and uncluttered, and readily identifiable.

    If either was put in production today, they’d still look fresh and new. No state-of-the-moment frills, inside or out.

    I won’t even go into the aural delights of either the C111’s rotary or Imperator’s AMG V8 powerplants. Mercedes wants to be all-electric now; so be it.

  19. What no 4 rotor! for shame

    I know its just a concept but I have to imagine visibility is terrible with this design. Even the front visibility looks bad.

    1. From that shot across the interior, and the header, it doesn’t look like you can see over the steering wheel, much less over the dash and out the window.

      And your feet must be in the air trying to use the pedals without any leverage. Reminds me of a hot sub’s contoured bucket seat.

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