Whoever said “they don’t build ’em like they used to” clearly wasn’t familiar with the Mercedes-Benz G-Class, because that off-roader has been in production for the better part of four decades now. Long enough for Daimler – or more specifically Magna Steyr – to have produced 300,000 of them, in fact.
That’s the milestone which the legendary Geländewagen has just reached, 38 years since production began at the plant in Graz, Austria, where it’s always been built.
The landmark vehicle is a G500 decked out in metallic blue, with a white-stitched black leather interior, black 16-inch alloys, and a roof rack. That’s not how an individual customer ordered it, but how the public voted in a Facebook poll. Fresh off the assembly line, it’s hitting the road (and leaving it) on an expedition that you’ll be able to follow under the tag #Gventure300k.
As major a milestone as that may be for the G-Wagen, it still leaves the vehicle in relative obscurity. Jeep, for example, sells nearly that many Wranglers every year. Land Rover has sold over 2 million Defenders. And Mercedes, well it sold nearly half a million C-Class models last year alone, and topped 7 million of those nearly a decade ago (after it was only introduced in 1993).
Still, that relatively modest number wouldn’t have even been reached by now were it not for the G’s escalating sales figures. Benz keeps selling more and more of them each year since 2009 – hitting 20,000 last year for the first time. With the imminent arrival, at long last, of an all-new model, sales (and production) only stand to grow further in the coming years.
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