The Cologne off-road specialist Matzker turns 40. Anyone who knows the scene a little knows the name: first as the address for serious expedition builds, for a long time as a Land Rover house, and today as one of the most successful INEOS Grenadier partners. We took a look at a company history that begins in the deserts of North Africa and then takes a few more twists.
It all started in the desert
The company history doesn’t begin in a workshop, but in the sand. Founder Amadeus Matzker was already travelling the deserts of North Africa in 1985, far from roads and help. Out there you learn quickly which parts hold and which give up, and that there is often no second chance. This feel for vehicles under extreme conditions later became the heart of the brand.
Matzker was a hands-on type early on. As a schoolboy he was already buying cars, doing them up and selling them on, at first in his parents’ garage. In 1986, at just 20, he turned that into a company. Over the years the small workshop grew into a business with a reputation that reached well beyond Germany. The idea was there from the start: individual concepts instead of off-the-shelf answers. „Geht nicht, gibt’s nicht”, roughly “there’s no such thing as can’t”, was never a slogan for the wall at Matzker, it was daily business. In 2003 the company moved to the larger site on Robert-Perthel-Straße in Cologne, where it still sits today.
The race track as a test lab
Amadeus Matzker drove himself, and hard. As the builder and driver of his own rally team he lined up at international desert races, among them the Baja Aragón, the UAE Desert Challenge and the Dakar. More than 250,000 kilometres in the world’s toughest deserts and over 25,000 rally kilometres came together this way.
That was passion, no question. But it was also the best test lab you could imagine. He learned what held up under full load in a race and what simply broke, and his experience flowed straight back into the workshop. A part that broke was reworked until it could take the extreme conditions. The Matzker products grew out of this back and forth between driving and fixing, and that is exactly what they still benefit from today.
2016: a hard blow
In 2016 Amadeus Matzker died suddenly, and for the company it was perhaps the biggest test of all. His wife Nina Matzker and Bernhard Körner took over the management together, thrown in at the deep end with no handover time. Körner knows the place inside out: he started at Matzker as a trainee in the car trade, became sales manager in 2012 and then moved up. To this day the two have kept the business steady and reshaped it at the same time.
From Land Rover to the Grenadier
The boldest step came in 2023: Matzker gave up its dealer contract with Jaguar Land Rover. For a house that had long stood for all things Land Rover, that was a real statement at the time. Almost at the same moment the chance with the INEOS Grenadier came up. Starting out as a commission partner, Matzker quickly became a full sales and service partner and today counts among the most successful names in the INEOS network.
So the story is far from over, of course. But 40 years, from the dune to the Grenadier, are worth a round of congratulations for now. Here’s to the next adventures.