G MAJOR

Merc's G-Class Experience Centre in Graz is a bucket-list item for off-road enthusiasts

- By Pablo Chaterji Photographs Mercedes-Benz

At 9.30 AM on a brilliant, sunny morning in Graz, Austria, I strode eagerly into a very swish hangar with 29 other wide-eyed people. All of us were journalists, writers, and influencers of various persuasions, and we were all clutching phones and action cameras like our lives depended on them. I wore pink sneakers (because apparently I make bad life choices if I have to wake up early). An instructor handed me a lanyard and said, 'You will not need to clean the car, but I can't say the same about your shoes.' I would later confirm he was not joking.

It's not every day that a guy willingly straps himself into three tonnes of German metal, points it directly at a cliff face, and says, 'Right, let's see if you're worth all this.' But then again, it's not every day you're in Graz, the holy ground where every Mercedes-Benz G-Class has been built since 1979. Graz itself is a bit of a mashup; it's part storybook alpine town, with its red-roofed old city, and part industrial powerhouse with Magna Steyr, the contract factory that hand-assembles the G. It's impossible to walk 50 paces in this town without finding three things — schnitzel, schnapps, and something reminding you this is where one of the world's most legendary SUVs was born. If you're a well-heeled individual, Mercedes invites you here for the G-Class Experience, a programme designed to test just how much punishment a 3-crore leather-lined brick can endure while still keeping your espresso hot and your backside massaged.