Mercedes 600 Pullman Still Has Plenty of Secrets
The Mercedes 600 Pullman, aka the Grosser, is the technology-intensive land yacht first presented to the world in the 1960s. Notable celebrities owned them, and the car’s high-profile status varied from Hollywood star to infamous dictator. It also had hydraulic powered… pretty much everything, which to some people mechanics, the words “Mercedes hydraulics” can cause trembling and emotional distress. But this car was far more than just a dictator’s way of separating himself from the bourgeois.
As we learned in a recent Road & Track article, the car’s hydraulics make for some very neat additional facts. There’s a repair kit for the hydraulic system, were you in need of one for an emergency; it contained extra lines, clamps, and hardware of a similar sort to keep all 3,200 psi within the system. Given the lack of electric motors having to hum during their operation, a lot of features on the 600 were inexplicably silent. What wasn’t silent was a horn which can be operated on two levels, one for the standard horn and one that puts fear into drivers within a 700-foot radius. Additionally, Paul Bracq was the designer of the 600, and later penned other visually pleasant cars, such as just about everything from BMW’s early ’70s lineup.
All of this and more can be found in the full article, which goes into the detail this car has truly earned.
Chime in with your thoughts on the forum. >>
Via [Road & Track]
