This Chopped G-Class Is Not a Mercedes-Benz

Now that the German automaker has introduced the first all-new G Wagon since the 1979 original (the shift took place in 2018), you might expect more and more aficionados to start looking for old examples with lower specs, whose prices may or may have not dropped.

But what if you want to get behind the wheel of a G-Class, but aren't anywhere near the hefty budget such an offroader obviously demands? Well, to return to Russia, an YouTuber from the country has decided to brew his own Gelandewagen and here we are, talking about it.

The starting point for the project, which comes from the iling show channel, was an offroader built by UAZ, which is one of the top local carmakers. Like the Mercedes-Benz G-Class, this vehicle has military vehicles at the top of its family tree, so perhaps this is what inspired the project.

As you can imagine, the transition from one vehicle to the other doesn't exactly come easy, and it requires tons and tons of fabrications. However, Russian vloggers adore documenting this sort of work - you'll find no less than four videos showcasing the progress recorded so far and, even though the narration is in Russian, you can always turn to the good old closed-captions-plus-automatic-translation formula to get some hints about what's going on.

Note that the idea wasn't just to build a G-something AMG clone. Instead, the machine has been slammed, while its top has been chopped. Oh, and those 22-inch wheels were there from the time this was just a tricked-out UAZ.