This Massive Unimog U500 Is the Ultimate Insane Mercedes Pickup Truck

this is a unimog it is an absolutely massive work truck towering above all regular pickup trucks and it's made by mercedes-benz you know the brand that builds the beautiful s-class and the luxurious mybach line well they also make this the ultimate truck and today i'm going to review it [Music] before i get started huge news this unimog is currently for sale on cars and bids cars and bids is my enthusiast car auction website the best place to buy and sell cool cars from the 1980s and up and right now this unimog is being auctioned live on cars and bids the craziest vehicle we have ever auctioned by far this unimog it can be yours on cars and bids click the link in the description below to check out the live auction for this unimog on carsandbids.com so let's talk unimog this is a 2004 model and it started life as a more traditional pickup truck with a single cab and a larger bed about five years ago a previous owner modified it to add a crew cab making it a more family-friendly unimog it is powered by a turbo diesel six-cylinder engine that makes about 260 horsepower and 700 pound-feet of torque and this will top out around 70 miles an hour but what you're probably thinking is why why does mercedes-benz build a truck that dwarfs every american heavy-duty super duty pickup that you can think of the answer is this is in germany a work vehicle unimogs are used for everything from farm implements to firefighting vehicles to military vehicles all sorts of uses basically any work purpose that you can think of the unimog can do it and so this is immensely capable and immensely huge and today i'm going to review it first i'm going to take you on a tour of this unimog and show you all of the quirks and features of maybe the craziest mercedes benz then i'm gonna get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give it a dug score and don't forget to click the link below to check out the live auction for this unimog on cars and bids where you can buy the ultimate pickup truck all right i'm going to start the quirks and features of this unimog by getting in that means we have to talk size this is massive i am over six feet tall and the unimog dwarfs me it is massively huger than i am absolutely a gigantic vehicle truly earning its title of ultimate pickup truck at least in this configuration it is huge and i say that as someone used to huge pickup trucks here in the us but anyway then you go to get inside and before i do that i want to show you the key look at this this is just a standard mercedes-benz key from this era like the late 90s early 2000s i had this key on an e-class that i owned long ago and now i'm going to be using it to start up this massive behemoth vehicle same deal with the door handles these are just regular mercedes benz like commercial grade door handles like what you'd see on a sprinter or other commercial vans and here they are on the unimog now they're mounted incredibly low on the door for obvious reasons if you put the door handles in the normal spot you'd be reaching way up to get to them so they're mounted down here so you can easily grab the door handle and open the door to begin your unimog experience but anyway next we climb into the unimog and yes this is as high as my camera goes and i guess i'll just have to make this angle work but anyway next you're in the unimog and even though the door handle and the key are relatively normal mercedes-benz nothing else in here is even remotely normal that becomes clear the moment you look around you'll notice there's a button with a rabbit and a donkey on it and that's when you know you're it's just not going to be a regular experience this vehicle if you haven't already figured that out but anyway i want to start with the door panel now on the door panel first thing you notice you have two large windows you have this front window that basically goes floor to ceiling in order to make sure you don't have any front blind spot when you're sitting in the seats you have that driver passenger side this large window now behind that you have a fairly traditional normal window as well so there's two windows in each front door now if you want to open the door from the inside you have this red plastic latch you pull it that's your door latch it opens the door and then you push and get out just like a normal door next up another interesting item in the door panel you have a giant circle in the middle of the door panel and in the center of that you have a hole that is for the window crank to manually roll down the windows but this is a luxury unimog and it does not have crank windows it has power windows and so you don't need it so there's just a giant hole there reminding you that you spent more money to get the better unimog with the luxury touches now the other thing you also see in that door panning and see cupholders there are two cup holders in each door panel i guess the theory here is you're out in the fields plowing you through your unimog or whatever you might not have access to water drinks for a long time so you want a lot of places to put drinks while you're using your unimog for work purposes and next up i want to go back to the windows for a second because when you climb in here one of the first things that hits you is just how massive the windows are you have those two on the door panel that i already showed you for maximum visibility but the windshield is just enormous in this vehicle absolutely huge you can see everywhere and everything in front of you to all sides you really do have fantastic front and side visibility in the unimog and of course you're sitting so high up you can see above and past everything too now one interesting thing with the windshield is the wipers this is their standard configuration when they're resting you have one down in the center and one up over on the passenger side that's normal when you turn on the wipers this is how they operate on the windshield they sort of go one after the other the left one wipes the area in front of the driver and the right one in front of the passenger like normal it's just that their configuration or their resting spot is rather strange now speaking of that windshield wiper stock to the left of the steering column it's relatively normal use it to turn on the wipers to flash the high beams to put on the turn signals nothing too strange about that except that at the end of the stalk you push it and that's where your horn is located now that was a pretty common thing for old trucks and old vehicles in general but the funny part is how the horn sounds in the unimog take a listen ah yes the mighty unimog and it's laughable pipsqueak so stupid it's not like mercedes didn't have other horns they could have used but they didn't and so that's all anyway next up moving to the stock coming off the other side of the steering column surprisingly this is cruise control this thing has a cruise control system like i said it is a luxury unimog you can turn that on and cruise at massive speeds like 30 miles an hour now this is so luxurious that in the center you can see you even have climate control with air conditioning this little button in the bottom right with the snowflake you push that and it turns on the air conditioning system which is a nice feature in such a commercial grade vehicle like this although one thing i do find kind of funny is the temperature adjustment dial there are like 12 settings of heat and only one setting of cold so they figure you're gonna want to be warmed a lot more than you're going to want to be cooled when you're driving the unimog not quite sure why that is but it's kind of a funny thing but anyway our next quirk in here above the windshield you have sun visors of course and you have three of them one for the driver's side one for the passenger side one for the middle three sun visors in your unimog which is fantastic although it actually makes sense when you think about it because in here there are three seats you have three front seats two passenger seats and then one driver's seat in the front of this unimog so three across seating kind of like the front bench seat in a pickup truck frankly although you still have a center console in here in addition to three seats that's just how massive this is but you also have the three sun visors to go along with it now next up speaking of the seats one interesting thing with the driver's seat is that it has sort of its own suspension system you can see this like accordion style piece under the seat that goes up and down to provide you with a comfortable ride based on your weight so you can see if i lift myself up a little bit from the seat the seat actually rises up to try to stay in its neutral position if i sit back down the seat goes down with me and then when you go over bumps the seat will also go up or down to kind of make it more comfortable in here sort of adding a second suspension system to the vehicle's already existing suspension for a more comfortable drive but anyway next we move on to some of the very craziest stuff of this unimog and some of that is in this center console you have this big panel of switches sort of randomly arranged there are blanks and switches in no discernible order now some of these are pretty obvious what they do for instance this is the power window switch like i showed you earlier says power windows you push that up or down driver passenger side to roll the windows up or down you also have the hazard light switch in here which makes sense and then this dial on the top is your differential locker and you can see you have three different choices your center differential or center and rear or you can lock all three diffs at once which makes this a pretty capable off-road ready vehicle not too many cars have a triple locking differential now as for the other buttons i am guessing with a few of them and then there are some that i have no idea the button with the rabbit and the donkey i assume relates to gearing and hauling if you press the rabbit you're probably unloaded you want to go fast and maybe that changes something with the gearing if you press the donkey you're probably loaded with stuff and then maybe the car changes its powertrain to match your load i would assume that's what that does next is switch on the bottom you can see a little circle and then an arrow pointing up and then at the bottom a little circle and an arrow pointing down this i think is for the central tire inflation system this vehicle has air lines running to each tire and so you can add air or deflate the tires automatically using this button without ever getting out of the vehicle now if you go off-roading you'll know this is really important you typically have to deflate your tires so if you go over rocks you don't get a flat tire but sitting out there and deflating each tire takes forever this thing does it automatically with this switch you just press and then it's deflated you press again and then it's inflated when you're done off-roading you're ready to drive on pavement that is an amazing feature not too many vehicles have now another switch on here is marked abs off-road and then below that off-road is crossed out i assume this changes the characteristics of the anti-lock braking system whether you're on or off-road maybe you don't want that feature to be active if you're off-roading for various reasons so you can disable it the rest of this stuff i really have no clue in the upper right you have a start stop switch i assume that's sort of the master power switch but then you have this like light with a beacon on it i pressed it nothing happened you also have this button that looks like a tire hanging on a pole looks kind of like a game of tetherball i pressed that again nothing happened don't really know what it does and i'm not really sure what some of the rest of these things do but that's a general tour of the center control stack in the unimog now you may be wondering for some of these buttons why don't you just look them up in the owner's manual the answer is i don't have one handy although they do exist these vehicles were sold new in north america in the mid 2000s and so presumably there are english owners manuals out there although obviously the vast majority of literature and information online is in german so it's kind of hard to figure out what some of this stuff does but in my opinion the function of those buttons i don't know doesn't really matter all that much anyway because it is certainly not the craziest thing about this unimog that honor goes to the stuff in the center console you can see there's a large group of things in here and i'm going to show you what they do they are very strange now i want to start with the transmission if you look on the driver's floor you can see there are three pedals in this truck a clutch to break a gas pedal pretty standard but you look in the middle and you see there's no manual gear lever you do have a joystick here which i will get to momentarily but that is not the gear lever the only transmission looking thing you have is this little lever and that is indeed your gear lever this vehicle has a pre-selector transmission and what that means is while you're driving along you pre-select the next gear and then the vehicle will shift into it here's how it works in practice when you start the unimog you are in neutral in order to get it in gear you push the clutch down and then push this lever forward and you have engaged second the truck always starts in second because first gear is a crawler gear for towing or pulling but anyway you engage second and then you let off the clutch and the truck begins rolling and then you get on the accelerator and you drive like normal until you need to up shift and then you press the gear selector forward again and you can see third gear is now blinking in the screen then you push the clutch in again third gear is engaged and then you continue on to shift into fourth same deal push the selector forward fourth gear starts blinking letting you know the truck is ready to shift into fourth then you press the clutch it shifts into fourth and then you continue going now this is an outdated transmission older vehicles used it as an improvement on a traditional manual because you didn't have to master shifting gears and pushing in the clutch at the same time since the vehicle would pre-select the next gear and shift when you pushed in the clutch you didn't have to do the hand work and the footwork but obviously it was replaced by the automatic transmission which makes it a lot easier but the unimog doesn't have that now you may be wondering how do you shift back into neutral all you got to do is push the little button at the end of the gear selector and then the truck goes back into neutral what you do if you want to park it or if you're coming up to a stoplight as for reverse when you're stopped you pull the gear lever down that engages reverse and then it's just like second you let off the clutch and the truck starts going backwards relatively simple it takes a little getting used to now it is worth noting one big benefit of this transmission is it can't miss a shift like you could in a traditional manual it won't do that there are controls that prevent it from shifting if the engine speed isn't correct so if you pre-select the next gear and your engine speed then drops and it's not ready to shift into it it will click at you to let you know no no i can't shift yet sorry and so you can't do any damage to the transmission which is another benefit over a regular manual now since i'm talking transmission i also want to discuss the gauge cluster and i'm going to start with the tachometer which has some helpful hints that make it easier to figure out when to shift now for one thing this tachometer you can see the red line is like 2600 rpm that is not something you see in most manual vehicles but with a diesel engine like this it's relatively common especially in commercial work vehicles but the interesting thing is the colors right below the tachometer you can see this top band of green that is when you're supposed to pre-select the next gear next to that you have yellow that's when you're supposed to push in the clutch and actually shift into the next gear in order to engage it and if you go by your tachometer colors you will do a pretty good job of driving this vehicle even with its rather strange pre-selector transmission now two other notable things in this gauge cluster for one the speedometer on the left only goes up to 75 miles an hour that's all you're gonna need that's about the top speed of this truck it does not go very fast next up over on the right of the gauge cluster there are two gauges that show psi measuring air pressure those are for your air brakes this truck doesn't have traditional brakes instead like most commercial vehicles it has air brakes and those gauges let you know your air pressure on your air brakes so you can make sure that your air brakes are working before you set off on your journeys but anyway our next interesting item in the center console you can see there's a yellow diamond and a red octagon the red octagon allows you to supply air to your trailer's air brake if you're towing a trailer that has air brakes the yellow diamond is your traditional standard parking brake in order to put on the parking brake you pull up on the diamond and then the parking brake is engaged if you want it turned off you push it down and then the parking brake is released it's an air brake very different from a traditional car's parking brake but it functions relatively the same once you know how to use it now amazingly next to that you have the headlight control and it's just a standard mercedes-benz headlight control i have the same one in my g-wagon and it's the same deal with the little outlet next to it so you have a little bit of familiarity there and i have to say it's kind of nice this is a rather intimidating set of buttons and switches and controls so it's kind of neat to see something okay i know what that is at least i can turn on the headlights in this vehicle but by far the best group of controls my favorite thing about this unimog is here in the center the joystick and all of the controls around it now i'm not going to pretend like i know what each one of these things does but i know the most important thing they do and that would be raise the dump truck bed that's right this isn't just a pickup it's also a dump truck so to make that happen you press this little circular button next to the mercedes-benz logo that like activates this whole panel and then you just pull the joystick back and you can see the dump truck bed begins it's dumping this is not just a standard pickup truck i told you this was the ultimate pickup truck and now you can see the dump truck that is lifting off and lifting back and it's a dump truck you're controlling it all with the joystick in here like a video game and i just love that obviously it's quite slow in operation you want to be careful but it works it's a dump truck but the fact that this is a dump truck is not the coolest thing about this bed the coolest thing is that this bed will tilt any direction you want if you move around this little pin here there are four holes all on the side of the bed and depending where you put these little pins that's the direction it tilts and yes that means what you think if you put two of these pins on the same side it will tilt sideways just watch this thing look at this it is a sideways tilting dump truck again i told you this was the ultimate pickup truck if you weren't sold by the hugeness or the central tire inflation system or the three sun visors well hopefully now you agree a sideways tilting bed this is just about one of the coolest things i've ever seen and frankly one of the most ridiculous totally unreal but the bed does a lot more than just tilt and also tilt to the side it can also carry stuff like a normal pickup truck bed but then that presents a bit of a problem because if you're carrying stuff around in the back of your unimog how do you access it like how do you get your stuff out of the bed in this vehicle fortunately there's a little bit of a solution for that the tailgate goes down of course you just pull these little pins on the side and then you can drop the tailgate and once you've done that as you can see a little step ladder is integrated into the tailgate you can pop it out and then you can climb up the ladder in order to get into the bed which is a pretty simple way to do it i suppose although you're still like five feet off the ground so it makes it a little bit challenging but next up our next interesting item with the bed it's not just the tailgate that can go down you also have latches on the side of the bed and if you pull those well then the side of the bed can go down too and the benefit here is obvious you now have a flatbed you put down the other side and you have a complete flatbed in case you want to carry something that would require a flatbed now this particular unimog has a tire mounted back here on this giant custom spare tire mount this tire is huge the tires in this truck are unbelievably large monster truck commercial grade vehicle tires and the idea of getting this tire down is kind of funny if you had a flat tire and somehow you were able to get the tire off the vehicle on the side of the road to change your tire then you'd still be stuck because there's no way you're getting this massive heavy enormous tire out of this bed which is like five feet up it's just be an incredibly cumbersome process just to change a tire but you do have a tire here a spare just in case because after all better safe than sorry but next up as you might imagine there are still quite a few interesting quirks and features to discuss including back here i'm going to start by folding up this tailgate now it's worth noting that these folding sides on the bed are also useful if you actually use this as a dump truck you fill this with stuff and then you tilt it back or to the side you can fold down the side so the stuff falls out like you would get in a dump truck but anyway you put this back in place and then you push in these latches to secure it in place one on each side and then the tailgate is now in this position and is secured once again and when it's up here it reveals some interesting things below specifically these little circles over on the left they're covered by these plastic covers they are power connections so you're out in the fields with your unimog you want to power some tool you can hook it up to your unimog and power it that way rather than having to try to find some electrical connection on your property thousands of acres very far away from anything your unimog is your tool powering system which is of course pretty nice and there's also a few interesting items worth noting over here once again fold up the side of the bed oh latch it into place pretty easy and again it reveals some interesting items specifically the wheel and i mentioned the wheel because it has an air line hooked into it you can see right here this little line is part of the central tire inflation system that i showed you earlier where you can add air or remove air by pushing a button in the interior rather than having to sit out here and lower the air manually now this back right wheel actually doesn't have the air airline they told me it's the only one where the ctis system isn't functioning that line isn't hooked up but otherwise it has it so you can air up and air down for off-roading adventures now the other interesting thing back here right here this is the fuel tank absolutely massive diesel fuel tank 60 gallons it will take which is an unbelievable amount a massive amount of fuel in this vehicle be very expensive to fill it of course and you have this giant fuel tank right here so you can fill it up and drive and drive and drive in your unimog now next up two other things i want to cover in this area before i move into the back seat and show you what's back there one is the ground clearance which you can see is pretty exceptional because well frankly i'm here and i'm pretty comfortable i could lie down here sleep read for a little while there's a lot of space and the reason for that is this has portal axles meaning the axles are not mounted directly into the center of the wheel and tire but instead they're higher up they use a system of gears that allow them to sit like six inches or even a foot higher and that provides for better ground clearance and it's a pretty impressive thing you can see the axle actually meeting the wheel higher than the center it's strange to see but some serious off-roader vehicles have this like hummers and the 4x4 squared mercedes g-wagon and of course the unimog would have it as well and next up just something i find personally amusing this vehicle is registered here in the great state of massachusetts you can see it is a beautiful day on the cape and this car has the protect and serve license plate to honor law enforcement officers now there are two types of people who get this license plate 10 percent are actual law enforcement officers 90 are people with bmw m4s who want to avoid getting a ticket and they think this landslide will help them but it's kind of funny to see it on the unimog because there is absolutely no way to get a speeding ticket in one of these but maybe the owner was hoping for a different kind of police officer leniency he was hoping an officer would give him a break if he saw that license plate and spotted the owner driving through a public park or over a housing development but anyway next i want to show you the back seats first let's talk engine access you may be wondering where the engine is because this thing is pretty flat in the front and the answer is it's mounted underneath the cab in order to access the engine you have to tilt the entire cab forward front and back and only then do you get access to the engine which makes it maybe a little bit challenging to work on although at least it's fairly easy to climb underneath now speaking of access it's also a bit difficult to get into the unimog you can see there's like stairs and not just one little running board like on a pickup truck you have three individual stairs to get in and frankly you need them because the floor of the interior pretty much comes up to the top of my chest almost to my neck so to get inside you grab on to an interior piece and then you go up the three stairs and then ah you're sitting in back so let's talk backseat the first thing you notice when you get in here is well not all that much actually the back seat is pretty sparse i told you this was a luxury unimog but it's not a very luxury unimog such a thing doesn't really exist it's ultimately still a heavy duty commercial vehicle you should feel lucky that you have a back seat at all and in fact this unimog wasn't built this way like i mentioned it started its life as a single cab vehicle with only the first row of seats the second row and the rear doors they were added later which is pretty common with unimogs a lot of times they're changed and reconfigured for whatever purpose the owner needs as a tow vehicle or a fire truck or a military vehicle whatever so it's pretty common to add remove subtract things on top and this one is a crew cab pickup but anyway like i said not much in these backseats although there are a few interesting quirks for one thing four seats back here just all next to each other so you have three seats in the front four in the back this is a seven seater in only two rows of seats you won't find that very commonly but even though there are four rear seats back here they're not exactly the most comfortable rear seats for one thing they have no backrest they're only seat bottoms if you want to rest your back you have to lean against like the rear of the cab that's all the comfort you get and this isn't exactly big on safety either there's no seat belts back here not just lap belts there's nothing zero seat belts for the rear seat so you're sort of just along for the ride and you have to hope nothing happens although you can share your concerns with the driver because there is a window between the front cab and the rear cab and you can slide it open and talk to the driver this is not just one large passenger compartment it's two different cabs front and rear with one giant sliding window between them now interestingly there is no window behind the rear seats none at all so you can't see behind you in this vehicle out of a back window anyway and in fact if you're in the front and you look on the front window there's a little x for where the rear view mirror is supposed to be but it isn't there there's no point really since there's no rear window i'm not sure why they didn't put in a back window considering they did put in a sliding window between the front and rear seats but hey that's the unimog quirk central now interestingly one luxury touchback here you have two different types of interior lights in the back you have sort of a general overall rear ambient light and then you have a more focused reading light so you can turn that on if you want to read the new york times while you're being burned around in your unimog good to see they have a reading light one thing you don't have back here is power windows you have crank windows in the back you gotta just roll it up and down manually yourself power windows in the front crank windows in the back that means the unimog is only the second car i've reviewed that has that feature after the dodge neon srt4 and that is the only thing they have in common and finally i want to move on to the front of this unimog to go over a few interesting quirks up here for one thing this color is not your standard like commercial vehicle white or black instead this is mercedes-benz designio platinum a high-end color to match the luxury unimog sort of it's very cool looking this color very striking and it certainly does look more upscale than a normal boring traditional color now a few interesting items worth noting the front one is the placement of the headlights you can see they're all the way down here even though this vehicle is so massive the headlights are very low and i think the theory there is to keep the headlights low like where a car's headlights would be so you don't blind car drivers when you're driving along if the headlights were up here it would be right in the rear view mirrors of cars so they mount the headlights lower to sort of even it out and make it more compliant on regular roads one other interesting thing up here is you can see you have the same hookups in front for electrical power as you did in the back over on the side you can see four different outlets basically where you can stick power and then you can power your tools again use your unimog as a power source if you're on your big property and you don't have access to any real electricity now the other thing here worth mentioning is this vehicle looks ridiculous absurd insane people keep staring at me and coming up to me and saying what is this thing it is one of the craziest looking vehicles you will ever see operated on the road and so now i'm going to go drive it interestingly you don't need a commercial driver's license for this it's not quite large or heavy enough and so i can just go drive it around like normal which seems insane but i'm not going to turn that down it is time to go drive the unimog let's do it all right driving the unimog i've engaged second i am moving this massive massive ridiculous vehicle slowly but surely first thing you realize when you sit in here total behemoth unbelievably sized for the road just insane and the visibility is amazing it's like you're in a fish tank i mean you can see everything on the planet in front of you and you're sitting so high you can doubly kind of see everything in front of you now the cool thing here with this transmission you can't pop the clutch and you can't miss a shift but it takes a little getting used to all right second and i'm off and i feel terrible for anybody who's behind me because it's just slow i can't believe what i'm driving this is insane i'm driving a unimog a new modern use this is crazy okay you got to remember to shift now you hear it clicking that's because it doesn't like i did i did something wrong there what happened was i tried to get the next gear but my engine speed was too low for it the thing about this car is you pretty much are always driving at least in six gear six gear starts around 20 miles an hour so you gotta go and you have to go through the gear sequentially so you gotta go one two three four five six now driving this thing around i mean it's just terrifying and i'll tell you one other thing with air brakes they're not like regular brakes you got to know what you're doing a little bit better and i really don't but i got to tell you i actually kind of like the driving experience once you get into the concept of the pre-selecting gear thing it starts to make some sense and you start to kind of get into it if you really mess up on the gear which happens fairly frequently it actually shifts you back into neutral the cool thing is even though with the clicking sound it sounds like you've just destroyed the transmission that's just basically there to tell you no you can't go through that gear sorry and it's a lockout to prevent it from to keep it safe basically so you're not messing anything up anyway so let's talk driving experience moving beyond the gear lever situation you sit up incredibly high you're basically at eye level with vehicles like dump trucks and massive giant insane commercial vehicles um you know people are getting paid to drive them they have a commercial driver's license that sort of thing the only difference here is you don't because you don't need one but you probably shouldn't have one given how massive this is one of the crazy things to me is just how much attention this thing attracts it's unbelievable the sheer number of people who have come up to me who have wanted to talk about it have wanted to see it and i'm shooting this video in new england which is not a place where people tend to talk to other people they kind of keep to themselves and yet people just couldn't stop they were so curious what is this thing what is it like it's a mercedes-benz how could that be now i do want to emphasize this thing is slow really seriously slow insanely slow i mean it's a big commercial vehicle tops out around 70 miles an hour i think the gear limiting said like 67 69 somewhere around there there are eight four gears so it has an eight-speed transmission but you really don't end up using i mean around town i'm in 7th right now at 30. just sitting up here i mean you really do feel like you're driving a commercial big rig truck i reviewed the ford uh f650 last year and it was also insane but this is kind of on a different level for one thing it just looks totally more intimidating that had kind of a cartoonish look to it this thing looks more serious more aggressive more angry um just more categorically ridiculous frankly i actually kind of enjoy driving it around it seems like a pretty cool vehicle it's just massive and kind of absurd and you can't see out the back and i mean you really gotta think and plan and you can't pull out in front of anybody it's just like driving a semi truck turning circle is kind of a disaster turning in general is a disaster you're fighting against physics and you really are and then braking is a bit of a challenge because it's the air brakes they're not traditional brakes and so you can't just put your foot on the brake yeah there's a technique to it if you do that it'll stop really fast you have to kind of roll on and you get used to that after a while truthfully this is one of the most absurd vehicles i've ever driven for the channel everything about this is crazy the fact that it's a dump truck the fact that it's a unimog an insane ridiculous unimog i mean you see older ones but newer ones like this are just uncommon and this is just a special absolutely absurd vehicle and one of the craziest cars i've ever driven by any stretch and so that's the unimog one of the craziest trucks in history the ultimate mercedes-benz workhorse a vehicle that makes american pickup trucks look silly by comparison this really is unbelievable and i'm thrilled that i had the chance to review it and now it's time to give this unimog a dug score starting with the weekend categories and styling the unimog isn't beautiful but it's cool striking and pretty perfect for what it is many commercial vehicles don't have much style but this kind of does and it gets a six out of ten acceleration it can barely do 60 miles an hour and gets a one out of ten handling is bad not just not good but like actively huge body roll and unending massiveness and it's just bad and it gets a very rare one out of 10. fun factor is pretty high this is fun to drive but mostly just fun to have and the off-road capabilities here are very impressive it gets a six out of ten cool factor is absolutely huge this turns heads everywhere and nobody has ever seen anything like it it gets a 9 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 23 out of 50. next up are the daily categories and features it has some good stuff like you know a dump truck bed but it doesn't have a radio for instance it's a bit of a mixed bag it gets a three out of 10. comfort is ok not great and it gets a 4 out of 10. quality seems high this truck is radically overbuilt so it'll probably run forever but interior quality is mediocre and it gets a 6 out of 10. practicality is low it seats 7 and it can go anywhere but actually it can't go anywhere because you can't put it in a garage or park into normal space so it's more impractical than you might think and it gets a three out of ten finally value and this is going to bring big money on cars and bids deep into the six figures but it would cost you a lot more to convert a different unimog yourself with the added crew cab and plus what's a few hundred grand for the ultimate pickup truck it gets a 7 out of 10 for a total daily score of 23 out of 50. added up and the doug score is 46 out of 100 which places it here against other ridiculous trucks and suvs i've tested its closest competitors are the ford f-650 which the unimog easily beats because it's far more capable and exciting plus the mercedes g63 6x6 which easily beats the unimog because the g is so much better designed for normal life but it's also a million bucks and the unimog is more capable and it turns a lot more heads for way less money it's just slower a lot slower [Music] all right okay let's focus

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 1,901,679

Rating: 4.7984838 out of 5

Keywords: unimog, unimog review, unimog u500, mercedes unimog, mercedes unimog review, u500, truck, pickup truck, demuro, doug de muro

Id: s1AJO5NfAEk

Length: 37min 7sec (2227 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ForksNotTines]

I'm gonna take the chance here to share my favourite Unimog video of all time.

Absolutely insane machines, they are.

[u/TenguBlade]

You know a vehicle is truly weird when Doug wears long pants and a sweater while reviewing it.

EDIT: Not just long pants and a sweater, but also gloves!

[u/acrspeed]

Now this is a proper Dougcember video. I was worried that we wouldn't get any unusual cars this year. I'm glad to be wrong.

[u/pryan886]

A Unimog! He actually found a Unimog to review. Yup. It’s still Dougcember.

[u/Astratum]

u/doug-demuro This Unimog misses the best Unimog feature: The Variosteering. What does Variosteering mean? It means you can literally move the steering wheel, gage cluster and pedals to the other side on the fly.

[u/famousgunner95]

Doug knows those are pnuematic/hydraulic hookups not electric right

[u/Vaeh]

Man, this SUV trend is really going weird places.

[u/AudiQuattroZoomZoom]

Well THIS is a surprise. This is just an insane, insane truck. Speaking of which, I would love it if Doug could get his hands on some Russian 4x4s like the Lada Niva/4x4 and the UAZ Hunter

[u/pryan886]

When he launched Cars & Bids he mentioned he might review some interesting cars listed in Southern California. I guess when Unimog pops up for sale, you drive across the country and disguise a work trip as a “vacation”. Just kidding. I’m sure filming this beast was as much business as it was pleasure.