The new book on the GWagen

I have in my hands a copy of the newly released book on the GWagen "The Legend keeps on driving - 25 years of the Mercedes-Benz G-Class", which I received early this week directly from the publishers. The book has 237 pages and the presentation is very neat.

Having said this, I am somehow disappointed. It dedicates some 40+14 pages to the current range, current technology and tecnical data of the current range which anyone could get for free from a sales brochure. Also it dedicates 8 pages to quite boring interviews with the persons responsible for the design and development of the G which I did not find that interesting and 14 pages to the passion of collecting GWagen models and memorabilia which I found of no interest whatsoever (I mean to be included in a book). This is a total of 76 pages which I would have done without.

Also, despite having the author (presumably) enjoying full access to the Mercedes picture collection, I can't help but feel that some of the pictures are unworthy of a book as important as this one: for example the feature on the Austrian military Puch contains a picture of the US IFAW (!).

There are however, many interesting and so far unpublished pictures, as well as many interesting sections in the book (all the others not mentioned above).

Particularly interesting are "The very special G-Class" and the production figures. Apart from column charts showing the production figures since 1979, these list the units produced of each and every type of Mercedes G-Wagen and the years of production (and it takes three double pages to cover this), but there again I found some silly flaws. For example, the breakdown is only for Mercedes-badged GWagens, not for Puchs.. Also, they could easily have included the units produced for each model in each year.
And last, but not least, the sum of units produced in each year does not tie up with the total production, which leads me to think that some figure must be wrong (or missing). Yes, I can see that they produced 489 Mercedes 500GEs and that all of them were made in 1993 but how many Puch badged 500GEs were made and when? I can only assume that there were 11 to make up the total 500 500GEs claimed but my deduction powers can only work for this limited-run model.

Yet, one can only praise this book if only for the simple reason of being the only expressly written GWagen book ever published in English (the Brooklands book is a compilation of magazine articles and Das Grosse Mercedes G Buch has never been translated into English). From this perspective, I can only wholeheartedly recommend the book to any self-respecting GWagen fan. A must, if you will.

Cheers