STRONGER THAN TIME

Surrounded by mythical mountains in Austria resides an astonishing playgroud. It is called the Mercedes-Benz Graz Experience Center and it is home to the Mercedes-Benz G-Class

- RAHUL GHOSH

There's a small Austrian town called Graz that looks like it slipped straight out of a travel magazine.

People pedal by with calm smiles, life glides on, and the whole scene feels like someone pressed pause on chaos. Watching over it all is Schöckl Mountain, a rugged giant that isn't just scenic wallpaper. It's ground zero to legend of the Mercedes-Benz G-Class. Since 1979, every G-Class has been born here, and it was on these rocky slopes that the SUV first proved it could take a beating and snigger.

So where else would you build a proving ground for a machine with this kind of stubborn spirit? Graz is home to the G-Class Experience Center, a massive, purpose-built off-road playground carved into virgin German countryside. This is where owners and a handful of lucky guests like us come to push the G-Class to its absolute edge, and maybe discover our own edges along the way.

The first thing that welcomes you at the Experience Center is a hangar befitting of the G's larger than life legacy. Inside, is a full scale immersion in history: the 500,000th G-Class ever built. Another one sealed like a prehistoric treasure in a giant block of Amber. This preserved display was created for the 1979 North American International Auto Show. Known as the G-Class Amber Cube, it weighs 44.4 tonnes and looks like something you'd expect post-apocalyptic scientists to chip open in a thousand years just to study the beast inside. Even the coffee here smells like it has G-DNA. After a quick briefing, the hangar doors draw open and there they were: an assortment of iconic G-Class models waiting on a rugged playground of mud, rock, and ego-testing slopes.