Mercedes' New S-Class Crosses Africa — Elephants Included — as Its 140-Stop World Tour Nears the End
Three of Mercedes' freshly updated flagships are wrapping up the African leg of a 140-stop global drive — sharing roads with elephants, baobabs, and a few well-traveled classics.
Mercedes-Benz's round-the-world S-Class convoy has rolled onto its sixth and final continent. A fresh batch of press photos shows the three sedans working their way down Africa — from the equator in Kenya to the Atlantic in Cape Town — and at one point yielding the road to a family of elephants.
The African route runs through Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa. Mercedes flagged the Equator Line, Nairobi National Park, and Kilimanjaro as headline stops, and the new images add plenty in between: a small-town filling station in the Kenyan highlands, the Great Rift Valley overlooks, empty desert highways, and a dusty gravel run that leaves the white paintwork looking honestly used.
As on earlier legs, the convoy keeps picking up company. The tour format calls for classic Mercedes models, current production cars, and local fleet vehicles to join at checkpoints, and the Africa set delivers — including a signature-covered classic C-Class that has clearly done some overlanding of its own, parked nose-to-nose with the new flagship under a baobab.
One continent left
The drive, called “140 Years. 140 Places,” began right after the new S-Class debuted at the Mercedes-Benz Museum on January 29. Three of the sedans are covering more than 50,000 kilometers (about 31,000 miles) across six continents, hitting 140 locations tied to the company's history — one for each year since Carl Benz filed his patent for the Motorwagen in 1886. Europe, South America, North America, Asia, India, Australia, and New Zealand are already done.
It's an unusual amount of public mileage to put on a car this new. The updated S-Class is the biggest mid-cycle overhaul in the model's history, with roughly 2,700 new or revised parts — more than half the car — plus the debut of the MB.OS software platform and an enlarged, illuminated grille. Most automakers would keep a just-launched flagship on a show stand; Mercedes is running its own six-month durability demo on African gravel instead.
In South Africa, the convoy got a brass-band welcome from Cape Town minstrels before posing beneath Table Mountain — about as far from Stuttgart as this trip gets.
The finale comes in October, when the cars return to Stuttgart, where the whole story started. Until then, Mercedes is adding images continuously to its media site, and the tour can be followed through the Mercedes-Benz Community hub and a YouTube host series that follows each continent.
