Concept
The car started out as a private venture in 1966 by company engineer Erich Waxenberger. His principle was simple: take the powerful 6.3 litre V8 Mercedes-Benz M100 engine from the luxurious 600 limousine, and fit it into the regular Mercedes-Benz W109 S-Class model which only had 6-cylinder engines at that time. The result was a nearly 2-tonne saloon with performance similar to most dedicated sports cars of the era. It is said that Rudolf Uhlenhaut, when invited to test drive the prototype, opened the hood at the first red light to find out how the big engine and its supporting equipment had been squeezed in there.
Surprisingly, the rather conservative company went ahead and launched the car into the marketplace at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1968, in order to make better use of the M100 engine production facilities. The 6,500 build of the 6.3 outnumbered the 2,700 build of the 600 by far.
What set this car apart from its contemporaries in the late 1960s though, was that it could cruise at over 200 km/h (124 mph) with 5 occupants in complete comfort within the body styled by Paul Bracq. Later, the company also fitted new, smaller V8 engines into the W109 series. The 300SEL 4.5 was only available in the USA, while the 280 SE 3.5 Coupé could also be ordered in Europe.
In 1975, the Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 was introduced as a 300SEL 6.3 successor with larger displacement, modifications to the equipment, and more power.
Read more about this topic: Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3
Famous quotes containing the word concept:
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“The concept of a person is logically prior to that of an individual consciousness. The concept of a person is not to be analysed as that of an animated body or an embodied anima.”
—Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919)
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—Robert Frost (1874–1963)