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Stripped-Down Mercedes-Benz E-Class Goes Off-road (for Science)

Even if you do know a lot of things about your car - and cars in general - you still spend most of your time looking through its windshield and at its dashboard, oblivious to what goes on underneath all that bodywork.
Stripped down Mercedes-Benz E-Class abuse 1 photo
Photo: YouTube screenshot
That's not a critique or anything, it's just how cars are made these days. Everything needs to be covered for both aesthetic and aerodynamic reasons, which is why a lot of people have absolutely no idea how the mechanical bits work. Or what most of them are called, for that matter.

Luckily, there's at least one guy on YouTube doing whatever it is that crosses your mind, so all you need to do is search. This guy, for example, is pretty handy with his tools, knows a thing or two about technical stuff and also happens to own a 4K camera that does slow motion. Put all these together, and you get a collection of videos showing things you always wanted to do but didn't have either the knowledge or the guts to do them.

On this particular instance, he got his hands on a Mercedes-Benz E-Class that was headed to the scrapper after two years of sitting around and decided to change its quick death with a slow, agonizing one. He's going to film all the abuse it can take while trying to educate us on the way on how various parts of the vehicle work.

First up, he thought he would focus on the car's suspension, so he went and stripped it to its bare chassis. Removing the doors was a bit of an overkill as far as suspensions are concerned, but he says it would all make sense in the following episodes.

After a few repairs that got the not-so-old Merc up and running, he went and looked for the most battered street in the Chicago region, and he found it. Not only is it a pothole convention, but it's also devoid of any asphalt, replaced by tons of gravel and dirt. You can see a parking lot in the background and we can only imagine what those cars looked like at the end of the day with all that dust flying around.

Not that our man with his doorless car seemed to care the least about it. He was more interested in seeing the suspension at work as the Mercedes-Benz E-Class hit the seven-inch deep pothole at 20 mph (32 km/h). He also spotted the chance for getting a bit of airtime and went for it.

Stripping down a car will always reveal interesting things - such as some packaging solutions found by the German engineers - but seeing the naked E-Class slam from pothole to another in slow motion just takes things to another level. Can't say we're not curious for the next episodes.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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