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Two years before being relocated to the New Mercedes-Benz Museum, in 2004 the historic collection set a new record: the Museum counted more than 500,000 visitors that year, the highest number ever since it opened in 1961. Compared just with 2003 this was an increase of over ten percent. Visitor number 500,000 in 2004 was 35-year-old Sun Yan from China. Around eleven percent of the guests now came from China, the largest percentage of visitors from a non-German-speaking country. In 2004 the special exhibition “100 Years of Social History at the Untertürkheim Factory” opened in the Museum. It showed the interrelationships between people, work and products in the history of the factory, which was set up in 1903 after the fire in the Cannstatt facilities.
In 2005 the forthcoming opening of the New Mercedes-Benz Museum took on increasingly sharper contours. In February the transport of the first exhibits to the new Museum began. These last few months provided the old Museum with the opportunity to stage a series of exciting special exhibitions. Under the title “The countdown is on”, the existing Museum filled the areas vacated by the removal of exhibits to the new Museum with special presentations.
One exhibition showed the legendary C 111 experimental vehicles, with which Mercedes-Benz tested the Wankel engine (among other things) and led the way in sports car design in the 1970s. Another theme of “The countdown is on” was the “Mercedes Simplex Parade,” a special exhibition with 13 of these “first modern automobiles” lasting until March 2006. For one last time these special shows made a visit to the old Mercedes-Benz Museum a very fascinating experience a few short months before the Museum closed.
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