HOW A SMALL NEW MEXICO IMPORTER FUELED THE MERCEDES G-WAGEN’S METEORIC RISE

Even if you don’t read People or Star, you’ve seen paparazzi photos of celebrities standing next to their cars and pumping gas at a Shell station on Santa Monica Boulevard. Not only do such photos make these stars of the silver screen seem just a bit more human, they also serve as subtle, valuable ads for automakers.

Dial yourself back to the mid-1990s, and you may have seen photos of Liam Neeson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christie Brinkley, and Boris Becker pumping (lots of) premium unleaded into a boxy SUV with a big three-pointed star on its grille. Today, of course, we know this as the Mercedes-Benz Geländewagen, better known as the G-Wagen or, officially, as the G-Class, mostly because the automaker sold nearly 14,000 of them in the U.S. in 2025—a real feat for a $155,000-plus vehicle.

But in 1998, back when the colorful Apple iMac also made its debut, these bulky SUVs were essentially unheard of. And those celebrities didn’t write a check to Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills or Mercedes-Benz of Greenwich; they wrote one to Europa International, a little company in an adobe-style stucco building on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “The City Different,” as Santa Fe has long billed itself, is a thousand miles from the nearest port of entry, as well as a full day of airline travel from Graz, Austria, where G-Wagens have been built by Magna-Steyr/Steyr-Daimler-Puch since the late 1970s. Yet if you had upward of $100,000 back then—worth about double that today—the only way to get one of these exclusive trucks was to call up Russ Leabch in Santa Fe.

Not many people could pay the price of entry, of course, but those who did were highly influential. They were excited about these bank vault–like off-roaders, with their trio of differential lock buttons, coil-sprung solid axles, and cabins lined with leather and wood trim. From the driver’s seat, a 1990s G-Wagen feels sort of like the iconic W124-generation E-Class sedan, except that it’s very narrow and its occupants sit roughly level with the four-door car’s roofline.

Never Destined for Luxury Transportation

The G-Wagen’s genesis in the 1970s is well-known. It was bred for military use, but Mercedes-Benz didn’t exactly know what to do with the tall off-roader that shared very little with anything else in its lineup other than its rudimentary but durable diesel engine. A sales push in the early 1980s saw the advent of some mild luxuries, like a car-like dashboard with reasonably convenient controls and seats upholstered in snazzy plaid fabric rather than easy-clean vinyl.

Buoyed by a weak German mark and a strong U.S. dollar, the so-called gray market was in full swing in the 1980s—right up until Mercedes-Benz put the (antilock?) brakes on things by advocating for the Reagan administration to implement the so-called 25-year rule that exists today. These gray-market importers—who did little more than change out metric speedometers to read in miles per hour, bolt on different lights, and affix rudimentary Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) tags to thousands of vehicles—significantly undercut car dealerships. Sure, you didn’t get a warranty, but if your Mercedes-Benz SL roadster cost you half as much through an importer as it did through the dealer, did you really care?

Although Mercedes-Benz didn’t sell the G-Wagen through its dealers in the U.S., the bulky off-roader nonetheless was still affected by the new import rules that closed up countless shops near ports of entry almost overnight. If anyone, including car manufacturers, wanted to bring a vehicle into the U.S., they now had to surrender at least a few examples to prohibitively expensive crash-testing and fuel-economy evaluations.

The G-Wagen Gets Dressed up for Americans

This did not present an insurmountable obstacle for Leabch and partner Dave Holland in Santa Fe, who had been importing G-Wagens since around 1983 and had already established a sterling reputation for sourcing these rudimentary off-roaders from Mercedes dealerships in Germany.

To federalize G-Wagens, Europa International had to spend a lot of money, which meant making these vehicles very expensive. Fortunately, Holland knew that Mercedes-Benz was planning a major refinement update for 1990, which would make the G-Wagen much more appealing to well-heeled buyers in the U.S. The second-generation G-Wagen was fundamentally still a 1970s-era military rig, except now it had an interior with wood trim, antilock brakes, and a lot more sound deadening. Also, Mercedes planned it from the get-go to have the six-cylinder gasoline power and four-speed automatic transmission combination that would make the G-Wagen capable of handling the Santa Monica Freeway and the Santa Monica Mountains.

Holland forged a relationship not with Mercedes-Benz but with the Austrian factory that largely hand-built G-Wagens under contract for the three-pointed star. With a direct line to Austria, Europa was able to specify vehicles it knew would appeal to its American customers. In short, basically everything: leather upholstery, heated seats, alloy wheels, and a decent audio system. These specially imported G-Wagens were initially titled not as a Mercedes-Benz but as a Europa. There were some additional compliance tweaks, too, like an instrument cluster with separate turn signal lights for left and right (instead of a single indicator, as was still common in Europe), indicator lights on the front and rear fenders, and, not long into the 1990s, a driver-side airbag as well as a third brake light. Europa did offer some options, like inward-facing jump seats in the cargo area, running boards, and a brush guard, but there was no way to get a basic diesel-fueled work truck in the U.S.

Through the late 1990s, Europa Gs had six-cylinder engines largely identical to what Mercedes-Benz bolted into its E-Class sedans. The early Europa models used the so-called M103 3.0-liter inline-six, while the later G320 had the more powerful M104 3.2-liter inline-six. The turning point came in the late 1990s, when Mercedes-Benz, largely in response to Europa customer pleas, offered the G500 with its 5.0-liter V-8. A few G55s modified by AMG, the once-independent tuner largely acquired by Mercedes parent Daimler in 1999, even made it here.

The default Europa G was a four-door SUV; a two-door cost a bit less, and a two-door convertible cost a bit more. In 1994, the cheapest 300GE—soon known as the G300, coinciding with Mercedes-Benz’s renaming scheme that same year—cost around $120,000. To reach buyers with that kind of budget, Europa advertised in big-name, high-end publications like the DuPont Registry as well as in financial papers like the Wall Street Journal. Some used Europa Gs ended up at Mercedes-Benz dealers, which sold them as essentially new but technically used cars with asking prices higher than their original Europa price. The advantage? Wealthy buyers could get into a G-Wagen today; anyone after a Europa model generally had to wait.

Mercedes Enters the Game

Mercedes-Benz didn’t give Europa the official nod to import the G-Wagen, but it also had no legal standing against Europa, since the importer had worked out its own deal to bring the Austrian SUVs to the U.S.

“Because there’s no [Mercedes-Benz] warranty on the vehicle, we can’t assist in problems a customer may have,” Mercedes-Benz spokesperson Denise Norman said back in 1994 when Europa’s first G-Wagens began arriving. “Customers can only deal with Mr. Holland, and that creates confusion. People see the [Mercedes] emblem and think they can call us with a problem, because they don’t see a difference.”

By 2002, Mercedes-Benz was wise to Europa and, in a twist, it had to negotiate the rights to sell its own product in the U.S. The exact terms of Mercedes’ deal with Europa remain a secret, however.

Almost overnight, an updated-for-2002 Mercedes-Benz G500—with no hint of Europa—was available in hundreds of Mercedes-Benz dealers across the U.S., and all for a significantly lower price. In 2001, a Europa G500 was about $130,000; the 2002 Mercedes-Benz G500 was about $73,000, and it had more features, like a navigation system, dual-zone automatic climate control, and half-decent cupholders. Oh, and its four-year/50,000-mile warranty covered service at any Mercedes dealer, not the handful that had a worked out deal with Europa.

We can thank—or blame, depending on your perspective—Europa for the G-Wagen’s relative ubiquity today. It’s one of the top-selling six-figure vehicles in the U.S. Few other vehicles have anywhere near the personality or panache of the G-Wagen, and if not for Europa’s persistence, it’s hard to imagine how the implement-like G-Class SUV would have evolved into a luxury icon. Europa saw an upscale niche and successfully targeted it.

Finding a Europa G-Wagen Today

In the mid-2010s, Joe Goacher was plenty busy running an import specialist repair shop in Loveland, Colorado, about an hour north of Denver. Among the vehicles Goacher serviced were G-Wagens, the vast majority of which were perhaps five or 10 years old and had been sold by Mercedes-Benz USA. Looking up parts for one was as simple as using the U.S. distributor’s parts catalog; much of what Goacher needed came from a nearby Mercedes dealer.

But then Goacher got a call from Europa salesman Leabch, who by then was living nearby in Colorado. Leabch had heard good things about Alliance Auto Care and he began recommending the shop to Europa G-Wagen owners. Over the 15-or-so years since the first 2002 G500s hit Mercedes dealers from Anchorage to Miami, Leabch had stayed on as Europa’s one-man sales department. Since anyone could walk into a Mercedes-Benz dealer for a G500 or G55, Europa was no longer selling those models. Instead, Leabch continued sourcing unique Gs from Germany, like convertibles and three-doors, and selling them for very large sums of money. While Leabch’s imports were nowhere near the quantity Mercedes-Benz was bringing in, they kept Europa’s lights on.

Today, Leabch will still source you a quirky G500 Cabriolet, but you’ll need at least $150,000 to get one with a U.S. title. If anything, Europa’s clientele has only gotten more exclusive.

Goacher, on the other hand, has become the nucleus of the G-Wagen community in the U.S. He estimates that around 80% of his customers ship their G-Wagens to Alliance for service. His sprawling operations on the south end of Loveland extend to two facilities separated by a busy four-lane road. One handles basic maintenance, while the other will turn any G-Wagen into a paying buyer’s dream rig—for a price, of course.

There are hundreds of 1990s Europa G-Wagens still in the U.S., and they generally sell for a good bit more than an ostensibly better official import. Why?

“The Europa Gs have a certain mystique,” Goacher says. “Many of them are still with their original owners, 30 years on. They’re basically heirlooms.”

They also have their own quirks, since they were built somewhat unofficially for what was once a very small market. Goacher has developed his reputation on being able to diagnose and solve just about any kind of G-Wagen problem. Someone with, say, a 2005 G500 can walk into a Mercedes-Benz dealer and have them look up which parts were bolted onto it at the factory. Since the Europa trucks were not officially distributed here, it can be trickier to find out how they were originally assembled.

Goacher notes that the plant in Austria made a fair amount of running changes during production, which rarely aligned with the kind of model years to which automakers adhere in the U.S. Knowing exactly when a Europa G was built can help determine just what was put on it.

And, if you’re lucky, you might find that your Europa G has quite a story to tell.

The post How a Small New Mexico Importer Fueled the Mercedes G-Wagen’s Meteoric Rise appeared first on Hagerty Media.

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2026-02-05T17:09:13Z