THE NEXT BIG THING?
LORD, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? So sang the tragic blues singer, Janis Joplin, in a song she wrote and recorded three days before her untimely death in 1970. To Joplin, the Merc was a symbol of consumerism, but to a growing number of today's dedicated Defender fans it is a passport to affordable power boost. Or, rather, one particular engine is.
We are talking about the legendary OM606 3.0-litre straight-six diesel, which in turbo-powered form produces 174 bhp and 243 lb-ft of torque. If you’ve ever taken a cab ride in a foreign country you’ll almost certainly have been a passenger in a Mercedes taxi powered by this hugely-popular engine, which was in production from 1993 to 2000.
Today, secondhand, the OM606 unit is plentiful, cheap, simple and bulletproof – good for 300,000 miles or more. It’s like a Tdi on steroids.
Of course, engine conversions are nothing new. Over the years we’ve seen just about every oil-burning lump squeezed into the engine bays of everything from Series Is to Range Rover Classics. Here at LRM, editor Patrick, sales manager Steve and myself all drive Land Rovers with very different power units to what Solihull originally intended. So what’s special about the 606?
To find out, we tracked down two Defender owners who have created the head-turning 606-based conversions you can see on these pages. Meet 32-year-old Sam Townsend (110 overlander) and Ali Carter, 28, (90 off-roader), who kindly agreed to this grilling…
How did you got the idea of putting Merc 606 engine in your Land Rovers - and why?
I first saw a 606 conversion at the Billing Show in 2016. Ollie North (who later started the MercRover group on Facebook) had fitted one into his Defender after designing and producing a selection of adaptor plates that allowed the 606 bellhousing to mate to any of the
