Mercedes-Benz G-Class W460

Erich Ledwinka drew it, which is a better sentence than it looks. He was the son of Hans Ledwinka, the Tatra engineer whose rear-engined cars fed directly into the Volkswagen Beetle, and his own work at Steyr-Daimler-Puch had produced the tiny Haflinger of 1959 and then the larger Pinzgauer. He came to the G from a lifetime of designing vehicles that had to work where there were no roads and no dealers. That shows in every panel. The body is flat because flat panels are cheap to press in small numbers and simple to replace in the field. The hinges are outside. The wings bolt on. The spare wheel hangs on a side-hinged rear door rather than under the floor where mud would live. The indicator pods stand proud of the wing tops. There is no styling in the ordinary sense, only a set of decisions about serviceability, and the accidental result is a shape so resolved that Mercedes has spent four decades refusing to change it. The Puch badge on some markets' cars is the honest version of the story.

Four years after the first one left Graz, a G-Class won the Paris-Dakar Rally outright. Jacky Ickx took the 1983 event in a Mercedes-Benz G-Class, having entered fourteen editions of the Dakar between 1981 and 2000 and won just this one, with the actor Claude Brasseur as his regular co-pilot. In an era when the Dakar was still winnable by a recognisable production four-wheel-drive vehicle rather than a purpose-built prototype, that result did more for the G-Class than any advertisement Daimler could have bought. Everything else in the vehicle's competition record is really service rather than sport, and it is worth saying so plainly: this is a machine that spent its career being used rather than raced. The Argentine Army adopted it in 1981 as the first military operator in the world, and the military 461 series that grew out of it has been in service somewhere ever since. Mercedes never built a homologation special out of the W460 and never needed to. The vehicle it sold was already the vehicle that won.

The G-Wagen got famous twice, and the first time had nothing to do with money. In 1980 Pope John Paul II was presented with a specially equipped G with a clear thermoplastic top for his first visit to Germany, which is the vehicle that fixed the word Popemobile in several languages. In 1981 the Argentine Army became the first military in the world to adopt it, and the 461 series that followed put the shape into service in dozens of countries. The second wave of fame is the one people picture now: the G as a luxury item and a celebrity fixture, all AMG badges and valet queues. That is the W463 from 1990, a different and far softer vehicle, and it is only credible because this one spent eleven years proving the hardware in coalfields and deserts. There is a small footnote worth knowing. Plenty of these were sold as a Puch G rather than a Mercedes, right up to 2000, and in Austria and Switzerland that badge is a point of pride rather than a downgrade.

The mechanical side of a W460 is close to untroubled. The diesels are famous for reaching enormous mileages on nothing but oil changes, the petrol engines are ordinary Mercedes units of the period, and the transmissions, axles and transfer case were specified for military duty and then sold to civilians. Nothing here is fragile. Corrosion is the thing that decides whether you have a project or a car. A steel body bolted to a ladder frame, built in the 1980s to be repaired rather than sealed, rots at the frame, the door bottoms, the floors and the seams, and it does it quietly under sound-deadening and trim. The tailgate carries a spare wheel and takes the strain accordingly. The other honest warning is pace. A naturally aspirated diesel G is slow in a way modern traffic does not accommodate, and the aerodynamics are those of a filing cabinet, so long journeys are loud and thirsty regardless of which engine you chose. Owners either accept that immediately or sell within a year. The ones who accept it tend to keep them for decades.