If you are one of those who lives in what you could call as a “hot zone” but still needs both luxury and protection at the same time, then this is good news for you. Mercedes-Benz had recently stepped up to address the problem and started manufacturing their latest model from the bulletproof lineup, the 2015 S-Class Guard.
The production of this special model kick starts about a year after the standard S-Class was manufactured in Sindelfingen. The S-Class Guard is hand-built on two floors of the Sindelfingen plant and is currently manufactured alongside the S-Class Pullman and the Guard variants of the E-Class, M-Class, and the G-Class.
Now, what kind of protection does the Guard provides for its occupants? To put it into perspective, they now offer the highest protection in the transparent areas, inline with ballistic protection levels 9 and 10. To those who are unfamiliar with the protection levels, Level 9 could withstand full metal jacket .30-06 caliber rounds while Level 10 takes it up a notch to the .50 caliber rounds. And for that, the windshield now weighs 135kg and is about 10cm thick.
The new S-Class Guard also comes with armor that has the VR6/VR7 protection level, designed to withstand projectiles from military-grade weapons that “travel twice as fast as bullets fired from a revolver”, fragments from hand grenades and other similar explosives. On top of that, 5cm thick steel plates are added on most parts of the passenger cabin to offer extra protection.
With all these upgrades, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class Guard comes only as the S600 Guard and has an added cost of about 200,000 Euros (RM 857,467) compared to the “regular” model.
