Mercedes-Benz has spent decades cultivating an image built on luxury, performance, and prestige — sleek sedans finished in silver, black, or white, with AMG badges doing the heavy lifting. But scroll back through the brand’s history and you’ll find something the modern lineup rarely gets credit for: Mercedes-Benz once built some of the toughest, most enduring automobiles on the planet. Long before the G-Wagen became a celebrity accessory, Stuttgart was engineering vehicles that simply refused to die.
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