Mercedes-Benz has released a fresh teaser of an open-top G-Class, a fabric roof folding away on a near-production prototype wearing camouflage on only a handful of panels. Both Mercedes-Benz and Mercedes-AMG badges appear in the tease, pointing to a G63 performance variant arriving alongside the standard car. The model it succeeds is one of the more desirable modern Mercedes built, for reasons that were largely accidental. The G-Wagen began in 1979 as a military vehicle developed with Steyr-Daimler-Puch, and the original soft-top existed chiefly because it was cheaper to produce, using less metal and glass than the wagon body.
Four decades of gradual luxury positioning did the rest. When Mercedes ended two-door cabriolet production in 2013, it marked the moment with the G500 Cabriolet Final Edition, 200 cars carrying badged B-pillars and a 5.5-litre V8, every unit sold before the model was even shown at Frankfurt.
Reports now indicate the revived Cabriolet will run a four-door layout on the current W465 platform, a departure from the short-wheelbase two-door body collectors have historically chased hardest, which raises the question of whether it inherits the same scarcity premium or establishes a different kind of demand entirely. Rather than recreating the exact car that left the market in 2013, Mercedes appears to be building a Cabriolet suited to how G-Class buyers actually use the vehicle today, as a full-size luxury SUV rather than a compact off-roader. Production is set for Magna Steyr in Graz, with series build scheduled for the third quarter of 2027 and a 2028 model year launch.
That timeline sits within a broader pattern of heritage automotive brands reviving discontinued configurations rather than developing new nameplates from scratch, trading on proven collector demand instead of the cost and risk of introducing something unfamiliar. Land Rover’s Defender relaunch and Porsche’s ongoing Heritage Design programme follow comparable logic, treating an existing enthusiast base as a more reliable customer than one still to be persuaded.
Pricing has not been announced. The fixed-roof G550 currently starts at $155,150 in the United States, including destination, and the Cabriolet is expected to sit well above it once revealed. Buyers unwilling to wait already have an aftermarket option: Brabus and Mansory both build four-door cabriolet conversions on the same W465 platform, effectively previewing what Mercedes is now bringing to production itself.
Production volume will shape how much scarcity premium the revived Cabriolet can hold onto, as will whether Mercedes treats the four-door layout as a genuine reinvention or simply a wider berth for a shape that partly earned its cachet from being hard to find. Either way, the teaser says as much about the strength of heritage demand within the SUV segment as it does about where Mercedes intends to take the G-Class next. Visit Mercedes-Benz here.
