Project X By Mercedes & Pioneer

Mercedes Benz World is the public face of Merc in the UK – that part of the corporate iceberg sticking up into our world. It is an awesomely cool showroom, as a significant part of the place is the business of selling Mercedes as the UK’s most well equipped dealership. I reckon it’s just one step down from flying to their German factory to drive your own one home to the UK yourself. It is a sexy steel and glass building alongside the river at Brooklands in Surrey, sharing a fabulous historic address with Sony’s UK headquarters. There’s a museum, shop, circular track with water jets and all sorts of track and Tarmacadam for you to try cars on. As I was trundling from the rendezvous point to go the front door to size it up and request permission for our exterior shot, I went past a schoolboy’s smorgasbord of every desirably mad-potent Mercedes in existence. You really can go and try out the AMG CL63 on a track!


They do youth driving training. If you can reach the pedals (and daddy can pay, of course) then you can learn to drive. Funnily enough, just after my visit, I read Quentin Wilson in the Sunday Mirror. He was dead in favour and cited that a similar scheme tripled the normal’ pass rate. Mind you, like immigrant populations being comprised solely of those with the balls to get up and go, students of such early drive courses will as yet be from the ranks of the keen and eager. I myself was incredibly lucky as a sixteen-year old. An off-road pretend street facility existed near me in Rayner’s Lane. (I know but it’s a coincidence) I got to do a driving course on a real life child’s toy-car-mat (with me in the Dinky toy) before the real on-road lessons. To this day I cannot imagine the fear of getting in a car on a real road for those first lessons.
I was at Mercedes Benz World to do this feature on the most extreme manufacturer-sanctioned Ice install ever done in the UK. It was in a Mercedes Vito Dualiner van and is called Project X. It even has the breath of Brabus upon it.

I was there on the day they were setting up for Smartfest, a celebration of all things Smartcar. Mercedes Benz World is taken over by thousands of Smartcars of every description and a bunch of exhibits to amuse and delight them. It turns out that your Smartcar crowd are as diverse and odd as those attracted by the hardcore VeeDub scene, just a little more Bohemian if that’s possible.
I was recognised by the senior diagnostic technician, while hanging around in the lobby awaiting the star vehicle’s arrival. He is where the buck stops for Mercedes but seemed a low-stress sort of a dude. A bit like being in charge of Carlsberg’s complaints desk. German modular engineering – ’nuff said. He gets to cure all and any of the odder things than can happen to modern cars. And Mercs have the most advanced onboard tech of any make check out ‘Rolling Roxy’, here:link it’s all about the time I had a go on a 500SL four years back
He reminded me where he knew me from as he used to be involved in the sound off scene and was regaling me with tales of how those occasional ‘˜failing to start’ incidents are often because owners say airily, ‘Oh, we’ve been away’ and mean it was a three-month stay in the Maldives. So, wealthy car owners have their own worries.
The Project X van was there, as it was at Trax (although that was technically prior to release) to promote the whole Vito line to a cooler more youthful demographic. Mercedes would like to see extreme sports dudes recognising the utter durability and solidity of the Vito product and imbuing it with some cool as they start to see surfboards on the roof or a trailer of trials bikes on the back.

So, by way of proof of just how cool the Vito van could get, a top chap at Pioneer, in the department that talks to car manufacturers, known as OEM (for Original Equipment from Marque or Manufacturer the vehicle’s that is) got talking to a senior person at Mercedes Benz, who he had a good contact with. And as is so often the case when two businessmen have a meeting of minds, something really brilliant happened.

They kept it all a big secret and although Paul Richardson at A1 Audio Designs (for my money the finest single designer/installer the UK’s ever seen) was itching to tell me about it, he couldn’t. Chosen as being the best bloke to make it look like the job was done at a Mercedes factory, the install is deeply specialised.
It could be extremely high performance. That’s commensurate with AMG and Brabus enhanced cars but still had to adhere utterly to Mercedes’ levels of factory integrity, quality of build and well, general Merc-ness. It had to seem as if a department had spent time reasoning it out…or in this case it had been explained carefully to the best aftermarket installer to create that level of fit and finish. The closer you get, the more it looks factory-perfect.
Here’s Mercedes’ own take on Project X.
“Project-X was conceived as a fun way of demonstrating what can be achieved with a Vito. We wanted to introduce Vito to a wider audience while offering something exciting and interactive that people can enjoy. Pioneer
were the natural partner for this project following their recent work converting vehicles with our car division.
Their innovative products perfectly match the qualities of our vans and we knew that they would be able to provide the kind of audio firepower that we were looking for. The final part in the jigsaw was to ensure Project-X looked the part. As Vito Sport-X models already feature Brabus wheels and spoilers as standard, we knew they were the right choice to provide showstopping details like those 20″ rims. We can’t wait to give everyone the opportunity to see and experience Project-X.”
Starting at the front, for convention’s sake, we have a Pioneer AVIC F-30BT double-DIN headunit. There’s a pair of TS-A131C component speakers in the door stock locations. But as there was an urge for more cabin SPL, the front captains chairs have been worked on to include as close to a D’Appolito array of speakers on their behinds as possible as each seat back has a pair (as in two sets altogether) of Pioneer TS-A172Ci components embedded within it. Turn around in that row of three seats that sit amidships and you can see hell or heaven depending upon your viewpoint.

For looking at you is a perfectly leather-clad wall of mayhem. Perhaps the last things you take on board are the paired Pioneer TS-A2013i 20cm coaxial speakers in their delicately angled sculpted pods. Then you spot the four tens in the middle, like a column of boom. They are Pioneer TS-W2501D4 subwoofers and are set up to play like hell as back up for the two Weapons-Grade Pioneer TS-W5102SPL competition subwoofers.
These are the legendary ones. The ones Pioneer said could be used to make 170dB. I told the then product manager of Pioneer that you simply couldn’t go around making claims like that and the very next week had to eat a fat slice of humble pie with no custard as a bunch of mad Swedes did just that. Sadly, the project couldn’t justify the enormous expense of adding the dual-alternator power system to be able to run eight amplifiers up the voice coils of these two mighty fifteen inch dustbin lids, as apart from anything else, when really cranking on the right tune, the system is easily slapping out the high one-forties in decibels already. It’d be like deregulating a big Mercedes to be able to go over 155mph. Just a bit extreme and not for the mainstream.

I really oughtn’t laugh but in the time-honoured fashion, we got our photography nicely done outside the front door of Mercedes Benz World and then I had a go and cranked it a bit. The Pioneer executive chap who was present just smiled indulgently. Then once we had moved back to the position the van would be in to do its exhibiting from, way over on the greensward to the rear, an acre or two away, said executive, Mr. Phil Barker, then plugged in his iPhone and frankly gave me both barrels.
It reached deep, it hit hard, it sent seismic ripples out across the turf, under the fabulous circular drifting-wet-skiddy pan thing and all the way to the main building, where other executives than the chap who helped make it happen were troubled and fretty. They came to see us started moving in our direction in a little cluster of worry and fine suiting within twenty seconds of the first ripple of Grime and had to be reassured, once they reached us that it wasn’t the absurdly flamboyant and shouty fat bloke in charge for the event (i.e. me) but the far more sensible and less nutty Pioneer executive chap, so they were happier.

What they didn’t know about was how much tuneage was to be pumped through the thing because if you go around the back and check out what is normally in such an install a space just for amps and batteries, you find that Paul at A1 has installed a set of Pioneer CDJ digital DJ decks. As well as a driver, your rock and roll Vito-inclusive lifestyle must needs also include your own personal DJ for when you stop.
As all the speaker chaos is inside, the clever Mr. Richardson also fitted two more speaker sets in the rear for monitoring use by the DJ at the decks. Another pair of TS-A2013i and a further set of TS-A171Ci components. Mister DJ gets to use a set of Pioneer DJ headphones that live back there as well since the whole lot is beautifully housed in perfectly trimmed neat panels.
The amplifiers are amongst Pioneer’s very best. Two of the PRS-D1200 SPL and two of the even bigger and sexier PRS-D2000 SPL are used to drive the four tens and two fifteens, whilst racked below them are a quartet of Pioneer GM-D950F Class D digital amplifiers to run all the coaxes and components around the install.

Fabulous never-seen before on a Vito 20 inch Brabus one-off wheels and even a one-off Brabus tailpipe piece help to add coolness, as does the fact that this has the implacably potent phat diesel V-something engine in its guts that can propel this Vito Dualiner up to 122mph on the Autobahn.
I absolutely loved it and would want it for a party-tour bus to go off on a raving summer with, complete with a mate or two – so DJ skillz will help you earn a seat. It’s going to be at all sorts of cool lifestyley extreme sporty type events next season and beyond, so you can catch up with it on its travels around the UK. Talk Audio will keep you up to speed on its whereabouts and events it’ll be attending, via the front page news slots as we find out ourselves.
Project X, the maddest OEM-sanctioned install ever done!
Check out a whole gallery of the entire shoot, right here: link