Mercedes-LegoYou\’ve probably seen portable buildings on the Internet that you could take anywhere, assemble in 20 or 30 minutes at most, and put away again to go somewhere else. These are already pretty extreme, but the truth is that you can really have your own house, and in one day. It\’s called modular housing.

Something similar is in the works at Mercedes: in 1995, the novel ideaVRC (Vario Research Car) was presented. This is a modular car that allows one to add three additional cars by replacing the upper part of the body. You may say that this is not necessary, that it is impractical, that it is very complicated and laborious. On the contrary, you may belong to the second group who think it is absolutely fantastic and would love to have something like that in their garage. There is no mistaking their respective opinions.

The replacement took less than 20 minutes and each such part reportedly weighed between 30 and 50 kilograms. In the unlikely event that you have a talent for manual labor, plus someone in the house who is willing to help, you will probably have no problem at all. The most complicated part, however, is storing the other three bodies. But then again, Mercedes came up with the interesting idea of setting up a special station where owners of such cars could come and deposit the three parts there to be replaced. Besides, for the first time a color display was also available for VRC cars, but this did not become widespread until the 1998 S-Class. Another feature of this car was a drive-by-wire (literally, driven by wires) system, which meant that the steering wheel, front axle wheel, brake pedal, and brake did not need to be physically connected. All information that something was about to happen to any of these components was communicated using wires and electricity.

But as you can see, 25 years have passed and we don\’t see such modular cars on the road and probably shouldn\’t count on it; the VRC cars were never considered the pinnacle of beauty, after all, it wasn\’t with looks but with Mercedes\’ capabilities, what Mercedes was capable of offering in the first place. Whether it was really a good idea or a bad idea is for each of us to decide.