Game over. This one over here does not know how to play. It looks every inch serious. And it looks like it eats pick-up trucks for breakfast. This old-school Unimog is the creation of Couch Off-Road Engineering. And it goes out to the rocky desert of Utah together with its competitors.
The Mercedes-Benz Unimog is not available in the United States. The Government imposes a 25-year rule for imports. Therefore, the vehicle that Couch Off-Road Engineering from Denver, Colorado, worked on is one of the newest that they could get their hands on.
With the reputation of an off-road beast since the 1940s, when it came into the world as a post-war military vehicle.
The figures of the modified old-school Unimog
The old-school Unimog that the company tweaked is from the 1990s and it features 32 forward gears. All gears are reversible. That means that one can drive backwards as fast as forwards. Top speed is of 80 mph (129 km/h).
It also boasts 430 horsepower and over 1,000 Newton meters of torque and an exhilarating ground clearance of 19 inches (48 centimeters). Consider that it weighs 13,800 pounds (6,259 kilograms)!
Eating pick-up trucks for breakfast, we said. Well, not literally. The Unimog now has the chance to fight them in the great outdoors. Jeep Wranglers, Ford F150s, first-gen Land Rover Defender. Will they be able to keep up with the German truck?
“The frame is twisting, but the box is trying to keep them twisting. In these machines, the body is floating on top of them and the frame does all the flexing”, explains the man that drives the Unimog along the rocky dust-covered route of the desert.
Such a model would sell for about $385,000, without the box at the rear.
“We actually prefer the older ones, because there is no computer control on them, it’s old-school. And honestly, building one of these older series and rebuilding them to the specs that we do is almost more expensive than a new one”, he adds. But the rebuild brings extra power, extra torque, superior speed and reliability.
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