The legendary BMW 2002ti, manufactured in 1968, started it all. The BMW Museum in Munich presents the history of the Bavarian Motor Works company, its models and its products in an area that covers 5000 square meters. More than 125 of the brand's cars, motorcycles and engines are on show - from the firm's origins to the present and the future.

Carl Benz is the father of the automobile. On January 29, 1886, he applied for a patent for his motor car. Nowadays the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart shows the 130-year history of the automobile with about 180 exhibits on nine floors covering 16,500 square meters. In addition to history, the company's visions for the future are presented.

If you want to see the Benz patent motor car number 1 from 1886, however, you have to go to Munich, to the Deutsches Museum. Here vehicles of all sorts are exhibited on 12,000 square meters. In addition to motor vehicles, you can look at locomotives and bicycles.

If you're interested in the history of the motor car, no matter what brand, this is for you: Ernst Freiberger's EFA Museum of German Automobile History in Amerang in Upper Bavaria. It invites you on a chronological journey of discovery through automotive engineering. More than 220 cars are displayed in an exhibition area of 6000 square meters and presented in a contemporary setting.

The Auto & Technik Museum in Sinsheim is also independent of any specific brands. It's a private museum with an exhibition area of more than 50,000 square meters. In addition to vintage and classic cars, Formula 1 cars, commercial vehicles and sports cars, you can also see motorcycles and airplanes. With around 260 cars on show, it's Germany's most comprehensive collection of automobiles.

If you like sports cars, you simply have to return to Stuttgart. Porsche describes the typical attributes of its vehicles as "fast, light, clever, powerful, intense and consistent," and that's also the way its permanent exhibition is structured. Visitors are led through 80 years in the history of one of the best-known sports and racing car manufacturers.

In contrast, the AutoMuseum Volkswagen appeals to the hearts of fans of the Beetle, Golf and Bulli. Of course, the exhibition isn't limited to those three models. In addition to unusual special vehicles, it traces the history of all VW models. Right next to the VW production facilities, some 130 vehicles are displayed in 5000 square meters of exhibition space.

The exhibition in the August Horch Museum in Zwickau is structured chronologically and covers a time span of just over 100 years. The oldest exhibit, a green Horch, dates from 1911. The museum shows models from what was called the "Auto Union," which consisted of Horch, Audi, DKW and Wanderer. First and foremost: the Trabant (Trabi), the best-known car made in communist East Germany.

Eisenach is also a traditional car manufacturing center with its own museum. Cars have been made and assembled here since 1898. The exhibition Automobile Welt Eisenach presents exhibits from the time of the Fahrzeugfabrik Eisenach AG, the era when it produced Dixi cars, and the BMW, EMW and Wartburg years, up to the start of Opel production in Eisenach in 1992.

The carmaker Audi's Museum Mobile in Ingolstadt completes the group of museums devoted to the best-known German car brands. Here, too, historical exhibits and current models are displayed next to each other. The museum doesn't see itself as just a museum of technology. It also demonstrates the economic and social parameters of the automotive industry.