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Germany’s Oldest Street-Legal Car | 1894 Benz Victoria

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A wooden-wheeled relic from 1894 still has license plates and a road-legal right to drive on German streets today.

Most 125-year-old automobiles live behind velvet ropes. This one gets driven. The 1894 Benz Victoria based at the PS.Speicher museum in Einbeck, Lower Saxony, holds the title of Germany’s oldest street-legal car, having actually passed the country’s notoriously strict TÜV roadworthiness inspection to earn real plates. DW’s Euromaxx caught up with the museum team as they fired up the single-cylinder engine and took the carriage out for a spin through town.

• Karl Benz designed the Victoria as his first four-wheeled automobile, built by Benz & Cie. in Mannheim; this particular example carries chassis number 99.
• The car runs a 3.0-liter, single-cylinder rear engine producing roughly 6 horsepower (4.4 kW), topping out between 27 and 29 km/h (about 17-18 mph).
• To satisfy modern TÜV rules, the museum operates it under specific restrictions: daytime driving only, hand-signaled turns with a red paddle, and stopping via lever-operated wooden brake shoes pressed against the rubber wheel rims.

19th-Century Design Passes Modern Inspection

Getting a car built before the invention of the traffic light through Germany’s TÜV is not a small bureaucratic favor. PS.Speicher museum director Lothar Meyer-Mertel and exhibition curator Sascha Fillies worked through the process to certify the Victoria for public roads, a job that meant reconciling patented 1894 engineering with contemporary vehicle codes. The car’s candle-lit carriage lanterns, for instance, aren’t bright enough for legal night driving, so the museum restricts it to daylight hours only.

Signaling turns is handled the old-fashioned way: a driver or passenger extends a handheld red directional paddle, or simply signals by arm, since there’s no wiring for turn indicators on a carriage designed before electrical lighting was standard on automobiles. Braking is just as analog — external wooden shoes, worked by hand levers, clamp directly onto the solid rubber tires wrapped around the wooden artillery-style wheels.

Starting the Engine Is Its Own Ritual

There’s no key, no ignition switch, no starter motor. Getting the Victoria running requires manually pre-lubricating the exposed mechanical linkages, then giving the heavy, open flywheel a vigorous spin by hand until the single-cylinder engine catches. It’s the kind of hands-on startup procedure that makes clear just how far automotive engineering has traveled since Karl Benz’s patented double-pivot steering system first let a four-wheeled car actually turn corners reliably.

The 125-year-old Benz doesn’t sit in a glass case — the PS.Speicher team drives it on real roads around Einbeck to keep the history genuinely running instead of just on display.

Museum Maintains Dynamic Exhibition Strategy

PS.Speicher could easily park the Victoria under glass and call it a day — plenty of comparably significant early automobiles spend their lives static. Instead, the museum treats road use as part of the preservation mission itself, regularly taking the car out around Einbeck rather than reserving it purely for exhibition. That approach draws a direct line from Benz’s original engineering breakthroughs to the driving public today, in a way no display case could replicate.

For anyone tracking how far cabin engineering has come since a carriage with candle lanterns and hand-paddle turn signals, it’s worth putting the Victoria’s bare-bones setup next to the rear seat experience of the new S-Class — both wear the Mercedes-Benz lineage, just separated by 125 years of everything that came after.

Nobody’s putting a 4.4-kilowatt single-cylinder engine into a modern showroom anytime soon, but PS.Speicher isn’t finished driving this one. The Victoria stays road-certified and keeps making appearances around Einbeck, flywheel spin and wooden brake shoes included, every time the museum decides it’s time to prove the oldest street-legal car in Germany can still earn that title on an actual street.