Why everyone should do an internship at Mercedes-Benz #blogpost

On Monday the last week of my 8 week internship at Daimler starts and I thought some of you might be interested in my experiences during the time in Sindelfingen.

As all of you probably know the Daimler AG unites worldwide operating car and truck manufacturers under one roof. Next to Frightliner, Setra, Mitsubishi fuso and Smart there is also this mighty brand with the star: Mercedes –Benz. Founded in 1926 after the merging of “Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft” and “Benz & Cie” Mercedes Benz is one of the biggest car manufacturers worldwide.

Aka. the best place to start your automotive career.

I made my application and soon found myself in a cosy apartment near Stuttgart (great city for car enthusiasts e.g. “Motor World Sindelfingen”). On the first few days we, the 10 interns and me got shown the production plant in Sindelfingen. It is huge! On 1.9 square kilometres about 30.000 employees work every day in shift work.

The Plant is split up in many buildings and departements. For example the Research and Development department which takes about a sixth of the area can only be accessed with special ID cards, security checks and your phone camera has to be mechanically deactivated. But that’s the business of people who already are engineers… (and hopefully in the future mine too)

The internship takes place in the apprentice workshop …which is …obviously… very huge, too! Daimler employs about a thousand apprentices in many different jobs like tool maker or technical model maker and therefore has a damn good equipment in terms of machines and tools.

Our task is to learn the basics of metals and synthetics processing so we can understand how hard it is to build a certain work piece. Beside filing, drilling and milling we worked with an engine lathe, too. Having spent 4 weeks making small training projects with these techniques I learned to respect the hard job and accuracy which is done by the workers every day.

The next task was welding. We tried different techniques like MIG, point and Gas-welding. My first welds… well you won’t put them in a meme saying “weld porn” but hey… I am happy with what I have archived in one week of welding.

In our time at the plant we even got the opportunity to have a look behind the scenes of the production-lines where the chassis of E- and S-class are built. It also includes CLS and CLS shooting brake. The engines are delivered from Untertürkheim which is the factory next to the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart

It was great to get some more insights than the normal plant tour. Seeing these big orange robots building a car out of a simple metal sheet is very interesting and I would totally recommend doing a factory tour to all of you fellow CTzens.

The last two weeks we spent at the product designers, model makers and car interior decorators. We learned to work with complex CAD programs (I even got the chance to design my own rim) and at the moment I think about starting an apprenticeship to become a technical product designer.

The model makers taught us how to make synthetics and what the pros and cons of carbon fibre and fibreglass are. In fact we made our own form out of fibreglass. Till the day I always wondered why carbon fibre is that expensive but our foreman told us that the production is too slow at the moment. Because carbon fibre and fibreglass are made out of different resins and the fibres, the chemical reactions take much time and due to that it’s not possible to produce carbon fibre parts in high quality and quantity today.

Last week was all about interior and seats. We worked with alcantara and real leather to build our own model seat and now I can appreciate the art of building a seat. You would probably never think of it, but to make every seam as perfectly straight as they are in car seats is as difficult as getting the thread into the needle.

Next week we are visiting the Mercedes Benz museum (prepare for the next blogpost) and on Saturday I’m headed back home to Berlin.

My recap aka TL,DR: The most interesting and exhausting few weeks for me so far. Working in a real production plant, seeing things others don’t and getting your hands on real metal to make things with your own hands is an experience everyone should have in their life to appreciate the work of others.

Thank you for reading and I wish you a pleasant Saturday!