Mercedes' 140th-Anniversary S-Class Tour Hits Istanbul and the Balkans on the Way Home
Three facelifted S-Class sedans are crossing Europe for a second time — through Turkey, Greece, and Hungary — before the 140-location world tour wraps up in Stuttgart in mid-October.
Mercedes-Benz's anniversary world tour has entered its final stretch. The three-car convoy of new S-Class sedans is back on European soil after covering five other continents, and the route home runs through some of the continent's most photogenic territory.
Over the coming weeks, the flagship sedans will work their way through Southeastern Europe, with stops planned in Turkey, Greece, and Hungary. From there, the route heads north through the Baltic states, across Scandinavia, and through the United Kingdom before the cars return to Stuttgart, where the tour is expected to finish in mid-October.
The latest batch of images shows the convoy threading through Istanbul — including a crossing of the Bosphorus at sunset — as well as stops in Albania and Bulgaria, where the modern cars posed alongside local classics and a roadside fruit stand or two.
The drive, dubbed "140 Years. 140 Places," began on January 29, 2026 — the day the facelifted S-Class made its world premiere at the Mercedes-Benz Museum, exactly 140 years after Carl Benz filed the patent for the first automobile. Since then, the three sedans, which Mercedes named Bertha, Carl, and Gottlieb after the company's founders, have been racking up a planned 31,000-plus miles (50,000 km) across six continents, hitting a symbolic 140 locations along the way.
Previous legs took the convoy across Western Europe, South America, North America — including a run along Route 66, which marks its 100th anniversary this year — plus Asia, Australia, India, and Africa. The halfway point came in Singapore, timed to the opening of the brand's first Mercedes-Benz Studio in Southeast Asia.
The car doing the mileage is the most extensive update of the current S-Class generation: Mercedes says roughly 2,700 components were changed or renewed for the facelift, which brought a larger grille, star-motif lighting, and a new MB.OS-based interior.
At each checkpoint, the new sedans are joined by classic Mercedes models, current production cars, and local fleet vehicles, with owner clubs and fans invited along. The finish line is where the story started: Stuttgart, sometime in the middle of next month.
