13 Nov 06
Being shot at is an unnerving experience.
It happened to me a few times during my teenage years: no, I don't come from some particularly violent Welsh 'hood, it's just that I was in the air cadets and spent a few hairy afternoons working in the butts of a couple of military firing ranges. It wasn't so much the sound of bullets whistling above my head that worried me, more the bullets that ricocheted off the frames of the targets and whizzed past me, sometimes only by inches.
Of course, that's nothing like being shot at deliberately, with someone actually trying to kill you. That must be just plain pant-fillingly scary. If someone was trying to do that to me (and there are probably a few people from my past who would volunteer for the task), I'd want to be well protected.
I'd want to be sitting in a Mercedes-Benz S-Guard.
The S-Guard is Merc's armoured S-Class, built from the ground up to protect world leaders - 90 governments worldwide use an S-Guard - and those who need defending from criminals and terroristic ne'er-do-wells, while also whisking them around in supreme comfort.
Demand for special-protection vehicles is rising and is currently especially high in Latin America, South Africa and southern Europe, where most buyers opt for High-Protection vehicles that will withstand bullets from handguns up to the .44 Magnum. In Central Europe and the former Soviet states, however, Highest-Protection Guard models are more the norm, where they have to defend against military-grade rifles and high-velocity ammo. Then there's also demand from, unsurprisingly, the Middle East and Asia.
