$385,000 Mercedes UNIMOG vs Hell's Revenge: Move Over Bronco & Wrangler There’s a New Boss in Moab!

[Applause] [Music] guys have you ever wondered what it's like to off-road a unimog four-wheel drive semi-truck right it's pretty close yeah yeah uh in moab well wonder no more because we're gonna do it this is jay couch and you have um couch off-road engineering right that's right yep so you build the rigs like this and also with g wagons we do the g wagons as well our mainstay is kind of the the unimog it's it's kind of the king of the castle for the big rig so it's just an easy platform to build on all right cool so we're right in front of hell's revenge do you say we should try some ah hell's revenge my most hated trail of moab because of all the uh cliffhanger stuff yes let's do it sounds like fun in the giant way let's let's go let's go i interrupt this video for this week's tfl bids bargain we sell a lot of cool trucks and offered suvs at the site and this week it's another gem it's a 2004 jeep wrangler lj it's basically a long wheelbase tj which is highly desirable this one has under 85 000 miles has a lot of cool custom touches including bumpers wheels and tires an exhaust system and nathan actually saw this jeep he gives us a personal walk around of it to show us the exact condition so use the link in the description below check it out and don't forget you can use the submit button to also submit your truck or suv for sale and we'll go to a good home with a like-minded enthusiast this guy yeah it's uh obvious it's a unimog this is a mid-90s machine uh we can only bring him in up to so many years old but what we do is we take a an older series truck and completely rebuild everything what's cool with this machine is a little extra longer than most uh horsepower instead of being 150 horses 320 we got about 800 foot pounds of torque out of it no computer controlled anything everything is old school this engine will literally melt it'll run if it's 100 degree day or 97 degrees it'll run e stuff sticks of margarine in the fuel tank it'll run on it so the engine is kind of right below you right now yeah ammo is actually sitting right up in front here so this will be the back of the motor and then the coolers are actually offset to one side so you can access the front of the engine all the belts um this has a we're actually prototyping an overdrive on it this is kind of conjured together button here so that gives me a selectable 29 overdrive without de-clutching so we're testing it out on the mag it's it's a system it's been around for a while but we're trying to see if it'll handle the big truck but what's neat is you've got your main eight-speed shifter here then this little shifter here engages what we call a working gear group it's a planetary reduction that brings first gear from a little under 100 to one to 680 to one first gear oh my god that's a factory option and then i have another one for that spot if i want to put it in that brings it up to 3 800 and something to one and multiplies it again all gears are reversible so if you have the balls to hold it straight enough you can do 70 miles an hour in reverse oh i've only done 50 and it's dicey trust me so uh what's nice if if you're rocking up and down something it's forward reverse forward reverse and it's synchronized so if you're in a mud hole or if you're pushing snow these are often work machines it works good for that you've got some other goodies we do is we added a hydraulic system which is often available on these trucks but this one didn't come with it so the hydraulics for the recovery winches winch right now one but there'll be a second one in the rear uh central tire inflation which is this guy through here if i turn the key on yeah this will inflate both now i inflate both or or deflate uh the front the rear or together okay and then i got a beep telling me that i'm uh rapidly losing air and shut that guy off and uh pretty slick four wheel drive this is two there's four there's both factory front rear diff locks and that's pneumatically engaged so no electronics to fail which is really trick it's kind of interesting people are always saying oh how do you let's isolate just have a rear locker and doing this for 30 years now with the mog you can't tell if you're picking up a wheel or whatnot it's such a big machine it's very very capable you just don't know if you're in a dicey situation so honestly you leave it in four wheel drive diffs open as soon as it stops moving forward you're like oh i might be picking up wheels lock them once you get through the nasty section you unlock them again you're good to go it also takes some of the strain off the drivetrain because face it this truck is 13 800 pounds as we sit right now with some camping gear in it yeah so pretty pretty heavy so it's just it's better to keep that way nice thing is too 19 inches of diff clearance really helps wow how many gear speeds i mean so we are let's think 32 speeds 30 32 all reversible uh unbelievable yeah all right all right well let's get going dude it's on man park brake almost like a semi truck so we're going to start deflating both of them right now you have a reverse camera so i do the mirror actually the mirrors are a little easier a little better a perspective i think so once we get up on this i'll put it in working here and i just leave it in the low range set so how's the visibility i mean this is amazing from up here it's really good except for when you're coming up over a cliff it gets pretty dicey so we're gonna go ahead and put in the working gear group stop the ctis so now just give you an idea that's first gear but we're not moving barely kind of moving so okay so yeah they're geared up okay they're pretty impressive so we'll just jump over into fourth gear actually which is actually six and then i'll put it into force as we get off onto this curve being this big you just take things slower and when you're up this high it's an inverted pendulum effect so any little bump kind of swings you around cliff yeah yeah with 32 speeds i mean you can do whatever speed you want right yep so this one uh i haven't maxed it out i get to 80 miles an hour and it just feels unnatural at that speed so i usually cruise it's 65 to 70 75. so it's kind of cool you wouldn't think this would work but uh once we get on the steeper part i'll hit the exhaust brakies yeah i actually use the exhaust brake a lot just because it's a little uh less invasive on the the binders so actually we'll just you step on it with your heel and it actually brings you down softly instead of when you step on the pedals a little more aggressive and you can tend to slip a tire uh-huh not as big of a deal on a 5 000 pound or under truck but 13 plus it's a big difference i gotcha so you build these for customers is that your main part yep that is our main deal unfortunately i got a really bad habit of building for myself so i probably have about 20 of these that are my personal personal rigs yeah um but our clientele is um it takes a long time to build one of these out especially as an expedition truck so i have some really phenomenal customers very patient as well and um we built most of our guys nowadays are for kind of traveling the world um because this is truly a global you know expedition truck this is really what you use for going across africa namibia south america russia just because you can fix it with your basic tools it has more off-road capability than out of out of the box than really any medium class vehicle out there or really anything for its size so it's nice to have a rig that you're only at about 50 percent of its off-road capability uh when you're traveling we're going to let some wranglers come around us and then we'll see this big rig flexing right here at hell's revenge it doesn't get much better than you this all right so that was a little warm up and now we're going to hit some bigger kind of boulders here thank you and see this unimog flex which is really [Applause] [Applause] amazing [Applause] [Applause] [Music] all right well i know that jeep will go pretty much anywhere but i'm a little bit worried about the other two so i'm gonna pull out my onyx off-road map to figure out what the terrain coming up is like so we know that the trx and the raptor can do it of course i'm being facetious but onyx off-road is really cool because we have really detailed satellite and topographical maps and you can download the map to your phone because out here there's not a lot of anything especially no service so let's keep on going i think the trucks will be fine but we'll have to wait and see i wanted to kind of turn around because we showed you a few things but jay says he wants to climb another big obstacle twist my arm there's not a big rig so this is about three to four feet ledge right there those tires are 46s almost four feet tall and it just kind of has enough torque just to kind of climb over this that's pretty awesome all right here he goes i would never attempt it in a jeep but thirteen thousand pound truck yikes yeah that's ridiculous i mean the clearances the approach departure angle and ground clearance on this truck is insane um it's unbelievable all right let's get going a little bit more the nice thing is you can do everything that we just did with a small house on the back tiny tiny house but still full-time living the what makes it possible is the chassis on this thing is extremely flexible almost more flexible anything else out there but what makes that work is the the cab and the subframe that carries the body on the back is on a diamond type structure either be a three point or four point diamond it allows that frame to twist up to i get about maximum 21 degrees of frame twist on this vehicle whoa and it doesn't bind or transmit any torsional forces to either the monocoque structures be it the body the cap of the truck or the camper so if you just mount a camper box like on a uh a ford or a dodge platform you bolted the frame the frame is twisting but the box is trying to keep from twisting so you things just like when you are tweaked out on a pickup truck you try to shut the tailgate it doesn't close or your doors don't these machines the bodies float on top of them and allow the frame to do all the flexing and whatnot and that just promotes longer life of the chassis your carrying components etc and the off-road mobility's increased so without the camper body on the back how much is a rig like this approximately so this one built out i just looked it up we're at about 385 000 right now okay um boxes could depend they could be anywhere from a turnkey box is never going to be less than 100 grand nice ones a little under 300 probably so you know by the time everything's said and done you're a little under 600 000 maybe a little over but uh what you get's pretty phenomenal and we actually build these older guys if i'm traveling the globe and just say i'm able to buy a brand new unimog we actually prefer the older ones simply because there's no computer control anything it's old school all that and honestly building one of these older series and rebuilding them to the spec that uh we do is almost more expensive than a new one but we also have more horsepower we have more speed we have better long term reliability rebuildability all that cool but if you if i don't have 400k right now to spend you also build some g-wagons and also suzuki's oh yeah samurais that's my favorite people come to my shop and they see these cameras one of these things i'm like do not knock the samurai those are my favorite um so the mogs actually could be down to that 75 000 mark and that's still a good reliable solid unit that's relatively fast the g wagons are a little overpriced for what they are but they're very capable machines they're very durable yeah i mean they get a little pricey samurai you know that's the king of the field right there the poor man's build but they're fun i love driving my samurais we stretch them we do this we do that but you got to go motorcycle camping when you're in a suzuki as opposed to and honestly that's how it started i'm a little mountain bike racer i used to run suzuki's back in the late 80s early 90s driving from here out to lake tahoe i couldn't carry enough stuff so then i ended up getting a bunch of unimogs so cool so how can people find you so it's easy it's couchoffroad.com companies called couch offroad engineering so just look up couchoffroad.com you'll find us so are people turned off by the manual transmission sometimes you know i get cus i'll get a call from a customer that's looking for an automatic gearbox and the reality is so the only time a manual is a problem if you can't dr other than not being able to drive one is if you're not geared low enough and the mogs are completely that's that's out of that's no problem at all and to be honest with you if you're out in the middle of namibia and an automatic transmission window let's go and let's go at once there's usually not a lot of warning at least with this i could lose one gear and keep skipping over it yeah but on top of that too there's a strange deal about the mechanical motion of a constant connection to the engine with that drive so on an automatic when you you idle up to a rock or a bump and it kind of stops for a minute and then the torque converter loads up and brings you over it you lose that carrying momentum forward where with a constant drive shaft running through there it'll hit but that motor loads up and then brings you right over so you carry a more consistent momentum path over all your obstacles okay one of the things that makes these things so capable so by the time if you can't drive a manual transmission and you want to travel the globe this is problem you know learn yeah you need to learn because you're going to need a situation where you're going to have to drive an old land rover to save your life or something or who knows so that's that's usually the answer to it in most people by the time i mean my girlfriend drives all these trucks i put other customers in it and they're like wow it's surprisingly easy you just once you get over the size and used to it it's you don't have to feather the clutch you just let the clutch out and it it drives it does it because there's so much gearing behind it right so the engine's a thousand pounds the flywheel clutch and crankshaft is 360 pounds okay so it just it doesn't die very easy so now now we're back on the cliff space uh my least favorite so just follow the arrows we're fine and look forward we'll only look forward is this truck about eight feet wide or what uh seven and a half i think okay so it's not too bad maybe not too bad too bad oh dude you could do it in your sleep right if i drove out here enough i could but i'll tell you what it always gets me off guard whenever i come into the insurance well when driving a 13 000 pound rig on a cliff face if you're not bothered by it you're probably not human right exactly where you probably shouldn't be driving yeah you don't know the danger that you're uh imposing to the earth when you're gonna hit it and yourself and yourself yeah you probably won't survive it if you go off this well now we're staring at the ground yes we are oh easy peasy lemon squeezy yeah they're definitely a different animal it's like i i compare it people ask what it's like riding off-road in one of these it's like riding a drunk elephant but it does it all day every day awesome jay well thank you for uh taking me for a ride very good we're good to have you guys out here man perfect timing so we'll see you in denver hopefully soon yeah heck yeah you got to come out to the couch pound we'll uh okay go on a controlled course testing proving ground and have a lot of fun all right dude we'll see you next time

Channel: TFLoffroad

Views: 558,344

Keywords: unimog, mercedes-benz unimog, mercedes unimog, mercedes-benz, mercedes benz unimog, mercedes unimog review, mercedes unimog off road, mercedes-benz unimog u218, mercedes-benz u218 unimog, mercedes-benz unimog truck, mercedes-benz unimog u4000, mercedes-benz unimog u5000 wagon, unimog (business operation), 2020 mercedes unimog, mercedes unimog 2020, 2019 mercedes unimog, benz unimog, mercedes unimog interior, mercedes unimog off-road, mercedes unimog test drive, couch off-road

Id: mPAhZJMXAUw

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/GoToSleepRightNow]

Oh man. Way too high center of gravity for me on those sand covered cliffs. Amazing vehicle though.