When we looked into the question of adding the history of Mercedes-Benz to the Auto Review series, it soon became apparent that there would be far too much for a single volume. We therefore decided to divide the story into four: Auto Review 143 covers Mercedes-Benz road cars and Auto Review 146 covers Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicles. This publication, Auto Review 149 is devoted to the Unimog, and Auto Review 156 will describe Mercedes-Benz competition cars.

In this publication we look at the history of the Unimog, a unique all-terrain vehicle conceived in the closing months of the Second World War. Its designers, Albert Friedrich and Heinrich Rössler had the prototypes built by Eberhard & Söhne, who could not bring the vehicles to production, so Boehringer of Göppingen built the first few hundred examples. Boehringer could not expand production to keep up with demand, so Daimler-Benz took over the operation and moved it to their truck plant in Gaggenau. There it stayed for half a century before moving again, to Daimler’s Wörth complex. The story told here covers all the dozens of different vehicles in the Unimog family, including military, paramilitary, emergency, expedition and road-rail vehicles, as well as the more usual agricultural and industrial applications.