Kristian Rene grew up in a family that loved automobiles. As a child, she heard about Bertha Benz. In high school, she wrote a report about women who changed the world, but didn’t find much information about Bertha. The only tidbits Rene found were that Bertha had financed her husband’s invention of the first Benz Patent-Motorwagen, built in 1885. As readers of The Star know, the Patent-Motorwagen was widely regarded as the world's first production automobile with an internal combustion engine.
Learning about Bertha helped make Rene a lifelong Mercedes-Benz fan. In addition to owning a restored 1959 Mercedes 190SL, her family has a G55 AMG daily driver named “Lady G,” a GLS63, and the family-style CLS63 AMG S+. The latest Mercedes-Benz to grace her garage is an imported 1992 diesel-powered 350GD Geländewagen. Rene names all of her vehicles; her personal recollection of automotive pioneer Bertha Benz led her to name the G-Wagen “Bertha” in that indomitable woman’s honor. After months of restoration and modifications, Bertha now holds the key to success in Rene’s next challenge.
“In college, I met a young woman named Chelsea Jarvis who introduced me to off-roading,” states Rene. “We were passionate but poor, determined but limited in an early ’90s era Jeep Cherokee. We spent years driving and navigating together.” Rene fell in love with the freedom and adventure that off-pavement travel afforded her. She’d scout and navigate as they drove together, understanding how to read a trail and place tires as though they were extensions of her own feet.
“There are many capable stock vehicles [for] off-roading but there’s a culture in Mercedes-Benz that really honors the automobile,” Rene said. “The G-Class is a statement in its own right, but its performance on-road combined with its capacity as a work horse is unparalleled.”
Having years of track experience under her belt, she has learned to appreciate the value of physics and speed. Rene also declares that her heart always wanted her to, “travel any path; not just the ones that are paved.”
Tackling the Rebelle Rally
Planning carefully for success, Rene is competing with Bertha in the all-women’s traditional navigational off-road event named the Rebelle Rally (www.rebellerally.com). This competition, set to run October 8–17, 2020, will cover 10 days and 1,500 miles – contestants are guided only by maps, a compass, and a heck of a lot of determination. Teams of two (driver and navigator) are tasked to find a few hundred hidden checkpoints scattered throughout the California and Nevada desert. Teams must be on time, on route, and in one piece every day. The team with the most points collected at the end of the competition wins their respective class. It’s not an easy thing to accomplish.
“Every skill set you’ve developed in your life is tested, and when you reach the end,” Rene exclaims, “the skills that actually matter in this life, the skills that actually determine your fate, are fine-tuned and capable of delivering things you thought you’d only dream about.”
Preparing for adventure
It’s taken many months to assess and restore the aged and badly battered G-Wagen. The Mercedes-Benz 350GD Geländewagen soon to be christened Bertha was brought into the United States from – as best as Rene can determine – “somewhere around Russia.”
She bought Bertha online in February 2019, and had the old G-Wagen shipped to Colorado for complete restoration. Joe Goacher, owner of Alliance Auto Care, in Loveland, Colorado, took on this major project with growing excitement once he learned of Bertha’s bruised history and Rene's big plans for its future.
“First and foremost, the quality and engineering [of Mercedes-Benz vehicles] is leaps and bounds above anything else,” states Goacher. “The vehicles are built using vastly superior parts when compared to other marques. It really makes our life more efficient, profitable, and successful when we know the product, parts, and what the outcome of the vehicle is at the beginning of a service repair.” Goacher further states Mercedes-Benz also has, “some really friggin’ cool stuff. GT-R, G65, the list goes on.”
One of Bertha’s most critically needed fixes was to replace the original OM603 engine with a more powerful, modern OM606 powerplant. The key factor with the 606 was that it has a pre-combustion chamber that allows Rene to run bio-fuel – a major goal in restoring the 350GD. Rene wanted to gear Bertha up for a “sweet” type of bio-diesel.
“My husband owns a chocolate company, and has in many ways fueled my passion for this project with his mechanical and chemistry expertise." Rene explained. "A few years ago, we started dabbling in making cocoa butter bio-fuel out of factory scrap. In order to run bio-fuel, I need a diesel engine and the G-Class is manufactured as a diesel in Europe.” Understanding the capabilities of the G-Wagen already, it was easy for her to stay loyal to the Mercedes-Benz brand. She decided to find a G-Wagen, import it, and run it on cocoa butter bio-fuel during the Rebelle Rally.
Wunderbar
The Wunder Collective was born from Rene’s bio-fuel project. “The more people I told about what we wanted to do, the more people stepped up to help and make it real,” she said with a smile. In Germany, the word “Wunder” means a miracle or prodigy of nature. Rene once read that a miracle is defined as a shift in perception. So, by morphing Bertha into a cocoa butter bio-fuel machine and successfully competing in the Rebelle Rally with it, Rene believes she could help change the way the world sees bio-fuel.
She thinks a lot of people see the future of mobility as either electric or public. However, Rene believes that the drivers of this world could change the equation. “They can’t be limited by the charge on their lithium battery or the train schedule. If we can reimagine great technology and make it better, while diverting waste and reversing carbon footprints, we’ve paved a new road to freedom and opened up a world of possibility.”
Rene’s goal is to help introduce a new, exceptionally clean-burning and powerful bio-fuel, one that’s even more powerful when compared to petroleum-based diesel. In order to do that, she’s had to forfeit a lot of electronic and modern equipment for traditional old-school Mercedes-Benz mechanical engineering.
What lies ahead
Recently, Rene took Bertha on a few successful off-road test excursions, and the venerable G-Wagen performed admirably. In fact, Bertha is now nearly ready for years of on- and off-road trail adventures. Rene says it best, “The G-Class is unbeatable. It’s a beautiful piece of engineering without any modification. The approach and departure angles almost guarantee that you can climb anything.” Rene believes it’s taken decades for other manufacturers to catch up to Mercedes-Benz, but still, she says most vehicles used for overlanding need extensive modifications to even come close to the capabilities of a stock G-Wagen.
Wunder Collective’s short-term goal is to prove they can recondition an already amazing machine with technology that will improve performance and surpass emissions standards – while diverting cocoa butter waste. They’ll put their innovation to the test while piloting Bertha 2,000 kilometers during the grueling Rebelle event.
Once Wunder’s short-term goals are met, the long-term desire is to take their green restoration initiative and redefine diesel as a viable solution for transportation. For Goacher this has been a challenging project, but his team at Alliance Auto Care enjoys working with the entire Wunder Collective group. Through Bertha, they’ve learned so much they can apply to other builds and projects. It’s opened their minds to what they can accomplish. Goacher adds, “We are not done yet, we're just getting started.”
