The diesel engine draws much of its appeal from the history of the Mercedes-Benz brand. It “learned to walk” in the motor vehicle at Benz & Cie. – at the beginning of the twentieth century, design engineer Prosper L’Orange developed a vehicle propulsion unit from Rudolf Diesel’s engine, and in 1923 the world’s first diesel truck originated in Mannheim. Finally, in 1936 Mercedes-Benz built the world’s first diesel passenger car. Since that time there has been an unending succession of innovations to every aspect of the compression-ignition engine in the vehicles of the Stuttgart-based brand. Mercedes-Benz and diesel technology thus go back over more than 70 years – an exciting story recounted by journalists Rüdiger Abele and Peter Thomas.