By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
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My father was the first in our end-of-the-road town to drive home a vehicle in the1940s or earlier. He had an innate affinity to machines.
A glance of my astrological chart would immediately say I got my father’s genes particularly with respect to vehicles. During my undergrad days, I had a Jeep, then a Toyota sedan. After two more Toyotas I acquired at a very cheap price an old Toyota Crown. Built with premium engineering whose main frame was copied from an old Chevrolet Impala. I was already in the college of law then.
Since the Toyota Crown, a luxury line was good, a Mercedes Benz must be a lot better. I found that out to be so. Why were Filipinos so enamored with the brand? Then I got the chance to buy a cheap one. I went to see it in Novaliches to find out if it was good for the money. When I met the owners, there were two teenage friends, I saw the body had already started rusting on the lower edges. Nothing serious though. When we started the engine it sounded good. It also looked good. So I paid for it.
Since that time, I was interested about anything with a tri-star, its logo, especially after finding out how good the car was performance-wise. Engineering? Even better. I was once an engineering student so I appreciated the technical specs—things you could readily feel when you drove the car.
The more I read about the company, the more I got interested with its products. Then at one time I was rummaging through goods in a thrift shop at Bangkal, Makati City, when I saw a stack of car magazines about Mercedes Benzes. Must have been owned by a foreigner who was a fanatic to the brand, which in no time I also became. In one of the articles there I found out how the name came to be. Since that was long ago, let us see what I can still make out from memory lane.
At about the time Karl Benz came out with his invention, the first car, there was another inventor in Germany who was also into cars, Gottlieb Daimler. While the two guys never met, their companies ended up merging into one.
That was how advanced the corporate laws already were in Germany. Such started to take shape in the 1400s then got refined over the years.
These show how backward we are. Our corporate laws started only in the early 1900s. That in a big way must have hampered the progress of our economy as our Spanish colonizers were more interested in exploiting us than shaping or coming up with laws to take care of economic or commercial progress.
With that, mergers, partnerships and joint ventures must have been scary things to get into in the Philippines due to lack of legal protection. Those involved must have just hacked each other with bolos if something went wrong.
In contrast, with the advanced laws of Germany then, it must have felt safe to get into joint ventures and also include other parties. So Benz and Daimler became partners and to promote and market their business, they invited a French car racer, Emil Jellinek, as the ambassador of the brand. He agreed in one condition, the name of her daughter Meredes will be added to the corporate name.
The tri-star logo was the original logo of Daimler while Benz was of course the surname of Karl. So as things turned out, the amalgamated name was a winner. The right “feng shui?”
Sadly, while the love affair of the public with the company’s products is enduring up to now, the love affairs of Mercedes often ended up in divorces.**
