It will take some time before Boris Rhein can accelerate on the open road. He drives his Mercedes 380 SLC through Nieder-Eschbach on the outskirts of Frankfurt. On the narrow streets, Rhein repeatedly raises his hand and smiles. Here they know him and his car, Rhein lives with his family a few streets away. He slows down, waits, but the oncoming traffic doesn’t react. The Prime Minister makes a slight gesture with his hand. “Now, now, bang, bang,” he says, more to himself. And then he continues. At the end of a forest there is the Frankfurt exit sign, warm rays of sunshine shine into the sports coupe. Rhine accelerates, 80 kilometers per hour. As the saying goes, can you tell a person’s character by their driving style? Rhein is at the wheel as usual: friendly, jovial, perhaps a little erratic. “My wife doesn’t like driving with me,” he says, shifting into fifth gear. “She thinks I’m accelerating too fast and following too closely.” He laughs. “Of course I see it differently.”Boris Rhein loves cars. Especially this one. A few years ago he decided to buy the 380 SLC. It was not available in good condition in his desired color of green. He now drives a brown model, built in 1980. That suits the eighties, a “decade of sophistication,” as he thinks. The Hessian Prime Minister raves: “It was the most modern and best car in the world at the time. Nobody could hold a candle to Germany when it came to that. Mercedes was the pacesetter when it came to innovative safety and technology.” So does the classic car now stand for everything that the German car industry no longer is today? And what does that mean for Germany? Time for a joyride through the Taunus to talk about it. The enjoyment begins when you get in. Top politics comes with a lot of hardships, but there is one advantage: in the morning there is a driver waiting at the front door who takes the Prime Minister to work and to appointments in the country. The Mercedes then stays in the garage. But Rhein sometimes goes for a ride in the evening when he wants to think, or he runs errands with it on the weekend. Because the battery is often empty, he keeps a starter set in the trunk. That’s one of the disadvantages of an old car. For him, as he describes it, the enjoyment begins when he gets in. When the door closes, it sounds like music, he says. Even if Mercedes didn’t employ sound designers at the time: a finely tuned, massive boom. Rhein sinks into the brown suede seats like a sofa. Because there is a photographer with him this time, he forgoes a ritual: lighting a cigarillo and opening the window. “I think there’s something so contemplative about driving and smoking.” The Rhine drives past fields that are about to be harvested, past trees, through small towns: Ober-Erlenbach, Burgholzhausen. . Even though Boris Rhein grew up in Dornbusch, a district of Frankfurt where you can easily travel by bus and train, he has driven a lot since he came of age. For him that means independence and flexibility. His first car, a Fiat Uno, was boxy, average, somewhat boring; the SLC is the opposite of that. Short break: Traveling through the Taunus with Boris Rhein and his Mercedes 380 SL C. Frank Röth Rhein drove the Fiat to events and meetings of the Junge Union and the CDU. He joined the party early, became district chairman of the JU in Frankfurt, member of the state parliament, CDU district chairman, and minister of the interior when he was not even 40 years old. Born in 1972, Rhine is too young for the “gas station connection”. At the beginning of the 1980s, young Hessian CDU politicians banded together to support each other’s advancement. Roland Koch and Franz Josef Jung were among them, one of whom became Prime Minister and the other of Federal Defense Minister. Their meeting point was, conveniently located, the Wetterau service area on the A 5. The dispute over climate protection also takes place in traffic. German history over the past decades is closely linked to the car. Rhein speaks of a “symbol of freedom”. When cyclists and pedestrians recently demanded more space, when parking spaces in many cities became seating and lanes became cycle paths, this caused a lot of political conflict. Traffic became a contentious issue. Rhein sees that fears and worries triggered by the changes were not taken seriously. He says, “We won’t get away from the car.” Rail traffic will certainly continue to be strengthened. “But the car is indispensable in the countryside and nothing will change.” The classic car dates from 1980.Frank RöthAs one of the first centrist politicians, two and a half years ago he criticized the combustion engine ban, which is due to come at EU level in 2035. He spoke of the car as a “guarantor of wealth” that one was putting at risk. In the F.A.Z. interview in April 2023, he said that China is not relying on electric cars because of climate protection, but for competition policy reasons. Rhine was criticized for this. From environmentalists, behind closed doors but also from car companies. The majority of them had decided on the course of e-mobility. Rhein does not see it as the task of politicians to tell companies which drive model will be predominant in the future – “even if it is the wish of some companies”. Consumers would have to decide. “When politics intervenes so drastically in the market, it almost always has negative consequences. That is one of the reasons for the crisis in the auto industry.” Rhein sees it as confirmation that a company like BMW, which continues to rely on the combustion engine, is doing better. His Mercedes 380 SLC: old but gold He has now parked the car on a hill near Köppern, a district of Friedrichsdorf. As he speaks, he strolls around his 380 SLC. He stops at the driver’s door: “See that pin?” At the time, that was a new locking system that Mercedes had developed. Until then, when cars overturned, the doors opened. “That doesn’t happen here anymore. Like so many things at Mercedes, it was for safety reasons.” This also applies to the large steering wheel: “It could have been made smaller and more elegant, but the advantage is that you can see all the dashboards.” Even if wood might have looked better, the steering wheel is made of plastic so that it doesn’t splinter on impact. He can be enthusiastic about such details. Under the hood there is a star in the middle of the eight-cylinder engine. “It is considered indestructible,” says Rhein. “Even though the car has 250,000 kilometers on it, it is the original engine.” He admits that he cannot answer any further questions. “I admire cars, but I’m happy when I know where to put the oil.” The sentence fits Rhein. He doesn’t take himself too seriously in certain situations – and is known among his employees to be more interested in the broad strokes than in the details in the files. He enjoys driving his car, and others do the repair work. When a racing cyclist approaches at high speed on the dirt road, swearing and making angry hand movements, Rhein looks irritated and shakes his head. “The brutalization that exists in parts of society is nowhere more evident than in traffic,” he says later while behind the wheel. He believes that road users are often unforgiving and aggressive. He was on summer vacation in France, where he rode a lot of racing bikes. “There you are much more considerate and keep your distance.”At the gas stationWhile Frankfurt’s skyscrapers can be seen on the horizon, cool air flows into the car. Rhein taps the English labels on the center console. “Back then, no one in Germany had air conditioning in their car.” Mercedes only installed the technology for the foreign market. And for the pop singer Peter Orloff, the first owner of the vehicle, who hit the charts in the 1970s with hits like “The Barbarian” and “Moulin Rouge”. Even back then, the coupé was not a rational decision, not a family carriage. It was reserved for the rich and famous. Some saw it as a pimp cart. Boris Rhein likes to drive through the Taunus in his vintage car to think and smoke. Frank RöthRhein stops at the Hessol gas station on the outskirts of Bad Homburg. On the way to the sales room, he explains how this place shaped his childhood. “When we went on vacation, my biggest dream was always to buy something to drink and eat at a gas station – maybe even a magazine. My mother was very thrifty. She always said: We don’t buy anything at gas stations.” She had buttered bread and water with her. Today it is a form of “overcompensation” when he wants to buy something at a gas station. “So, what would you like?” Shortly afterwards, Boris Rhein is sitting on a small terrace with an espresso in a paper cup and a bottle of water. The evening sun is shining, the nearby highway is noisy. Rhein opens the folder with numbers that employees have put together for him. They show how heavily even Hesse, which is not considered a car country, depends on the industry. Companies such as Opel in Rüsselsheim, Mercedes in Kassel, Volkswagen in Baunatal and many suppliers in Central Hesse achieve sales of around 21 billion euros. “The automotive and supplier industry is the backbone of our economy,” says Rhein. “The final end of the combustion engine would not only be a loss of technology, it would mean a loss of prosperity for Germany that could be existential.”More on the topicIsn’t he exaggerating the importance of politics by calling for a move away from the combustion ban? The crises at VW, Mercedes and Audi are also related to the fact that there is less demand for combustion engines in the long-standing sales market of China. What if Germany continues to build combustion engines but the world doesn’t want to buy them? “If Germany doesn’t build combustion engines, someone else in the world will. If in doubt, less economically than what would happen here,” he says. “The goal must be climate neutrality. But we see that today’s combustion engine is completely different than it was 40 years ago.” For Boris Rhein, the answer lies in what makes the Mercedes 380 SLC from 1980 special: Back then, thanks to research and innovation, no one could hold a candle to the Germans.
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