Mercedes-Benz (China) Automobile Sales Co., Ltd., Unimog, founded in 1946, is a brand of Mercedes-Benz Motors, known as the "king of off-road" famous off-road vehicle brand, the world's best performance multi-purpose off-road vehicle
Unimog is a family of dual-use trucks designed by Daimler-Benz after World War II and is now part of Mercedes-Benz, a subsidiary of the Daimler Group. The name Unimog is derived from the German word "Universal-Motor-Gerät", which means universal self-propelled implement. It was earlier designed to be a low-speed agricultural tractor.
Thanks to the portal gear, which allows the axles and propeller shafts to be positioned higher than the centre of the tyres, the Unimog has a higher ground clearance than the HMMWV. Unimog also uses a flexible frame with a large vertical space for the wheels to move, so that the vehicle can still be comfortable when driving on unusually rough terrain or even a metre high rock.
The multi-purpose of one vehicle is an important feature of Unimog. In Europe, Unimog is widely used in the private sector, including lifting for the repair of street signs and street lights, and for towing various agricultural machinery. On the construction site, it can be used to tow bulldozers, excavation turntables, cranes, etc., or tow a 20-wheel large flatbed truck to transport a 30-ton bulldozer or excavator. In addition, it can be used as a short-distance towing head in the train maintenance center. At the same time, due to Unimog's excellent cross-country performance, more than 80 countries, including Germany, Switzerland, South Africa and New Zealand, use it for military purposes, such as converting it into armored personnel carriers or towing tank carriers.
Albert Friedrich, the creator of Unimog, was originally the brains of Daimler-Benz's aero-engine design department. He had an idea to design a small tractor during the Second World War and began designing a new car immediately after the war ended in 1945. Although Unimog was originally built as a farming machine, it was completely different in design from conventional tractors. Among the many people who assisted Friedrich in the development of new cars, Heinrich Rößler, who worked in the engine development department of Daimler-Benz before the war but became a farmer after the war, was a major contributor and provided valuable experience in farming.
Friedrich originally portrayed the Unimog as an "engine-powered universally applicable machine for agriculture", but at that time the name "Unimog" had not yet been formed. The new car under development uses a four-wheel drive system with four wheels of equal size (wheels on the front and rear axles of a typical tractor are often of different sizes) and can be used as a tractor, agricultural platform, fixed work platform and conveyor, with an output of up to 25hp (hp), a six-speed gearbox, and a target speed of 50 km/h (km/h).
在初步的概念确定后，弗里德里希与当时正占领Germany的美军接触，因为在那时代Germany境内任何工业器具的生产，都需先经过盟军的同意取得生产许可。弗里德里希选择了位于施瓦本格明德的艾哈德先生与子公司（Messrs. Erhard & Sons）作为开发原型车的合作对象，后者是一家金器与银器的制造商。
In the second half of 1946, Friedrich succeeded in building the first prototype car, with a sloping front bonnet, a soft-roof cockpit, and a cargo platform behind the cabin, and the overall shape was very consistent with that of the actual production vehicles that followed. At the same time, the new car received its first official name – Universal-Motor-Gerät (universally applicable motorised machine), abbreviated as "Unimog".
The Unimog prototype was first unveiled in the spring of 1947, but until then the engineers had not had time to find a suitable diesel engine for it. Fidelich and others hoped to equip the new car with the OM 636 engine developed by Daimler-Benz, but by the time the prototype was completed, the engine had not even been decided to go into production.
After solving the engine supply problem, the new car was supposed to be ready for production in earnest, but new problems once again hindered progress. Although Erhard did his best to assist in the development of the new car, Friedrich was forced to find a new partner, as the company itself did not specialize in automotive or large-scale mechanical engineering and simply did not have the right capacity to produce the new car. Many car manufacturers were not interested in Unimog at the time, and they turned to Boehringer, a machine tool manufacturer based in Göppingen, and in 1947 they started manufacturing Unimog. At the 1948 German Agricultural Exhibition in Frankfurt, the Unimog production car was officially unveiled to the public for the first time.
In August 1948, Unimog began large-scale production, and since Bohringer itself was not a professional car manufacturer, Friedrich's team had to find additional personnel to set up a dedicated sales system for Unimog, in addition to engineering development.
By the summer of 1950, about 600 Unimogs had been produced, and the first generation of Unimog wore a bull's head emblem with a "U" horn on it. However, the popularity of new cars has exposed the plight of the manufacturer's own lack of production capacity, and the high investment required to increase production capacity is beyond the reach of a small manufacturer like Bohringer. Against this backdrop, Friedrich had to sell the entire development team, the new car program, the technology patents, and the newly established sales structure to Daimler-Benz, which took over Unimog in the autumn of 1950 and moved production to their truck plant in Gaganau, where production continues to this day.
