In 2025 the ADAC, the German automobile club, came to help broken-down drivers 3,691,813 times. A breakdown call came in every nine seconds.
Every year the club publishes its Pannenstatistik, its breakdown statistics. It counts the breakdowns per 1,000 vehicles of each model. A model series is included only if more than 7,000 of it were registered in at least two of its first ten years. The 2026 edition covers 158 models from 27 makers. It rates 74 model series as extremely reliable.
Guido Storz invented a coupling for fire hoses in 1882. It has no male end and no female end. Any two couplings of the same size fit together, and a short turn locks them. A firefighter never has to look for the right end of a hose.
Some German fire brigades adopted it as early as 1887. It was patented in 1890. Sources disagree on whether that patent was Swiss or German. The Storz-Kupplung is still the standard of German fire brigades.
In 1952 Hannes Marker, a ski instructor from Garmisch, founded his binding company. His Duplex toe held the boot with clips on springs. In a fall, the clips were forced outward, and the boot was released.
Marker calls the Duplex the world’s first binding with a releasing toe. The French firm Look had introduced its Nevada release binding in 1950. The year of the Duplex is also uncertain. Marker gives 1952, other sources give 1953.
In 1978 Mercedes-Benz offered ABS in the S-Class, developed with Bosch. In full braking, a computer watches each wheel and reduces the brake pressure automatically, so the car can still be steered. The driver airbag with belt tensioner followed in the S-Class. Its public world premiere was in February 1981.
In late 2002 PRE-SAFE came to the S-Class of the 2003 model series. It recognizes dangerous situations in advance and prepares the occupants before a possible crash. In 2009 ATTENTION ASSIST followed in the E-Class and S-Class. It judges the driver’s tiredness mainly from steering movements, with more than 70 parameters. When the driver needs a break, a coffee cup appears on the instrument panel.
According to the federal economics ministry, Germany holds about 17 percent of all ISO secretariats, the offices that lead the international standards committees. DIN holds almost 29 percent of all secretariats in the European Committee for Standardization. A DIN chart of 2021 put DIN first among national bodies in leading ISO secretariats, ahead of the American ANSI and the British BSI.
A DIN presentation of June 2021 explained the point. Durch die Leitung von Technischen Komitees können strategische Felder besetzt werden. By leading technical committees, strategic fields can be occupied. The same slide carried the saying Wer schreibt, der bleibt. Who writes, remains.
In 2025 the head of DIN added that China, which a few years earlier had led fewer than 2 percent of the committees, now led 11 percent.
In 2006 Airbus announced delays of up to a year for the A380. The plane carries about 500 kilometers of wiring. Engineers in Germany and Spain had worked with an older version of the design software, CATIA 4, while the teams in France and Britain used CATIA 5. Data were lost in the transfer from one system to the other.
According to the Seattle Times, the engineers in Germany had refused to change and went on working with the older version. Airbus’s head of production, Tom Williams, said: “We were just storing up a long-term problem.”
SAP brought its standard business software R/3 to market in 1992. In 2008 the magazine CIO quoted Andreas Werner-Scheer of Münchner Hypothekenbank on what standard software requires: die Prozesse den Gegebenheiten der Software anzupassen und nicht umgekehrt, to adapt the processes to the software, and not the reverse.
Business managers argue against it, Paul Riedo of Swisscom told the same magazine. Wenn wir alles standardisiert haben, dann unterscheiden wir uns ja nicht mehr vom Wettbewerb. If we have standardized everything, we are no longer different from the competition. If we had asked the specialist departments what they wanted, Werner-Scheer said, hätten wir 70 Prozent Eigenentwicklungen, we would have 70 percent in-house developments.
Volkswagen calls it the Modularer Querbaukasten, the modular transverse toolkit, or MQB. Many models share the same parts and the same basic structure. The first Golf built on it left the line in Wolfsburg in October 2012. Within ten years more than 32 million vehicles had been built on the platform.
According to Volkswagen, the number of engine and transmission variants fell by almost half. The air-conditioning units went from 102 versions to 28. For the Golf of 2019, about 80 percent of the existing body-shop equipment was used again.
DIN, the German Institute for Standardization, has set out principles for applying its standards. They begin with responsibility. Jeder deliktsfähige Mensch hat sein Handeln (Tun und Unterlassen) selbst zu verantworten. Der Anwender einer DIN-Norm ist davon nicht ausgenommen. Every person who is legally liable is responsible for his own actions and omissions. The user of a DIN standard is no exception.
The user must therefore keep several points in mind. He needs the understanding required to apply the standard correctly, because DIN-Normen sind nicht für Laien gedacht, DIN standards are not meant for laypeople. The standard is only one source of technically proper conduct im Regelfall, in the normal case. And applying it wider besseres eigenes Wissen, against one’s own better knowledge, is forbidden.
In 2002 Ferdinand Piëch, then chairman of Volkswagen’s board of management, drove a concept car from Wolfsburg to Hamburg. The study was called 1L, for one liter of fuel per 100 kilometers.
The production version was the XL1, a plug-in hybrid. Volkswagen expected it to use 0.9 liters per 100 kilometers. It weighed 795 kilograms, and its drag coefficient was about 0.19. A limited production began in 2013, at a price from 111,000 euros. Sources differ on the number built, 200 or 250.