Bill Gates Once Bought the Slowest Bulletproof Car in the World
The richest man in the world really wanted a bulletproof Mercedes wagon, but the German automaker declined, allegedly claiming the liability was just too high. The post Bill Gates Once Bought the Slowest Bulletproof Car in the World appeared first on The Drive.
Once the richest person in the world, Bill Gates played an instrumental role in helping pass the “Show and Display” rule that lets collectors register an imported car not built to American standards, as long as it’s driven sparingly. The law allowed him to legally drive around in a Porsche 959, but he wanted a more low-key car to use daily, and he wanted it to be armored. As a result, he ended up with one of the slowest bulletproof cars ever.
Terry Haigh, a former high-end car sales manager in Bellevue, Washington, said in VINwiki’s recent video that he remembers a representative for Gates walking into Mercedes-Benz of Bellevue and asking to order a bulletproof station wagon. Gates, who was already a high-profile executive, was seemingly concerned about safety and wanted his kids to ride around in an armored car. The video doesn’t identify the model Gates wanted to buy, but it shows a picture of an S124, which later morphed into the original E-Class. There was no such thing as an armored, regular-production wagon in the Mercedes portfolio at the time, so Haigh reached out to Germany and asked whether they could build one for a wealthy, high-profile client.
Surprisingly, Mercedes allegedly shot down the request. Haigh summed up the company’s reply in a few sentences: “We’re not gonna do that. The liability is too much. If something should happen, if something happened to those kids, and we told Bill that we made a car that was bullet-resistant or something like that, or that couldn’t be damaged… we just don’t want to get there. We don’t want anything to do with that car.”
The search for an armored wagon didn’t end there. The representative for Gates reportedly asked a Volvo dealership whether a 240 could be bulletproofed, and somewhat surprisingly, the answer was “yes.” We don’t know if Volvo armored the wagon in-house or if it outsourced the work to a third-party company, what was done during the conversion, and where the wagon is located today, but the added safety came at the expense of performance. Making a car bulletproof adds a lot of weight, and the 240 wasn’t very fast to begin with.
Volvo stopped selling the 240 after the 1993 model year, so we’ll use that as an example. Offered as a sedan and a wagon, the model came with a 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine rated at 114 horsepower and 136 lb-ft of torque. The wagon weighed about 3,050 pounds, and hitting 60 mph took over 10 seconds. Adding even, say, 1,000 pounds of armor (including thicker glass) would give it Super Beetle-like acceleration. The S124 would have fared a little better: In 1993, the 3,450-pound 300TE came with a 177-hp 3.0-liter straight-six engine.
It sounds like the wagon’s performance was the last of the Gates family’s problems. Haigh, who worked for the same company that owned the Volvo dealer across the street, remembered an amusing anecdote: The armored Volvo was in the shop every month because the driver’s window motor failed under the weight of the thicker glass. Fitting a more powerful motor wasn’t considered, for some reason. The shop simply removed the door panel, replaced the motor, and then sent the car on its way.
These and a few more interesting stories can be heard in the full episode.
Got tips or information about the armored Volvo’s current location? Send ’em to tips@thedrive.com
The post Bill Gates Once Bought the Slowest Bulletproof Car in the World appeared first on The Drive.
