PocoLoco

This is our expedition truck, born in 1994. It is the youngster of the family. It received its uncommon name during a meeting (and b-b-q) with nice (and a little bit freaky) people in southern Texas. PocoLoco is spanish and means nothing more than "a little bit crazy". It's a Mercedes-Benz UNIMOG U-2450 L/38 with a few (necessary and perhaps also some unnecessary...) features.

Please read also our FAQ-page with the most common questions and answers concerning our vehicle.

The Idea

It began in the year 1989 on a 4-week-journey through central Australia. We had rented a normal camper-van in Australia's red center. We realized after a few days that it is an absolute necessity to travel with a four-wheel-drive vehicle in certain regions of the world. And so we rented such a vehicle on the spot to visit a well-known valley: Palm Valley. This valley is known for the finding of prehistoric palms - a jewel of central Australia that is rarely visited. There we met for the first time a four-wheel-drive vehicle of our dreams, big enough to take a little house with itself: A Mannesmann-Mercedes-Off-Road-Bus. The idea was born to build our own house on wheels (or better: to have it built)!

The Realization

After three years of thinking about it, we knew exactly what we wanted to have in our rolling home. We wrote down our ideas and sent this letter to all the producers of expedition trucks in Europe we knew - five at that time. Shortly after that only two of them were still in evaluation - the others didn't exist anymore or were unable to fulfill our needs. The two remaining producers were an Austrian company called Action Mobil and a German company called Unicat. Both invited us to visit them at the Off-Road-Fair in 1992 in Cologne/Germany. During this visit we had the opportunity to see the exhibited vehicles in detail. We knew already that all those vehicles were primarily one-of-a-kind products, built to fulfill the needs of a specific customer. Apart from wooden interiors, nice flowered draperies, special boards for knick-knacks and so on - all those things were not our taste - at the end the vehicle by Unicat impressed us the most with its stability and better concept, although the offered price was much higher than that of the Austrian company. A long phase of design followed with a lot of interesting discussions. Every square inch of the vehicle had to be planned, so that no space would be wasted. After that, the production phase took even longer - 1 1/2 years - so that we had the possibility to test all the features of our new rolling home on our first test journey from June 1994 onwards, which led us to Iceland.

The Test Journey

Because we knew that it makes a big difference if you have a vehicle purchased out of a catalog (prefabricated) or an individual product, we planned this step consciously in advance. Every function, every part of the vehicle needed to be tested thoroughly. In Europe, Iceland is the best area for such "purposes" - there you have not only paved roads, but you also have gravel, sand, mud, water, snow, ice and certainly also the sharp-edged lava. So we shipped our new truck from Denmark to Iceland and stayed approximately 2 months (and in 1996 another 3 months) on the island. Of course this journey had also another goal: to get to know every detail of the vehicle and to learn to use it properly. In Switzerland everyone has to pass a special drivers examination if you want to drive a vehicle weighing more than 3.5 metric tons - we passed that exam already because our truck has a total weight of about 12 metric tons. Nevertheless, such an exam is no diploma for driving a Unimog perfectly! The third day of our first Iceland journey we got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled out (you see, this can also happen with a Unimog!). In other situations we had to learn that dangerous hazardious situations are best managed in slow gears and so on. Every day we learned something new and had many experiences. At the end our vehicle saved our lives while passing through a deep ice-cold glacier river of seven feet depth. With a good portion of luck and with the right technique we survived. After our two trips all parts of the vehicle that turned out to be not properly set or not working had to be fixed in Germany.

Questions ?

If you have any questions concerning details of the shown vehicle, don't hesitate to write us and click here! We will be glad to answer as soon as possible!