OM360

The line runs back to the OM 67/4, the six that carried the L 4500 through the war and after it. In 1950 Daimler-Benz enlarged that engine into the 8.3-liter OM 315, still with pre-chambers; in the mid-1960s the same design was converted to direct injection, opened out to 8.7 liters on a 115 × 140 mm bore and stroke, and renamed OM 360. A smaller relation, the eight-liter OM 327, sat below it. Both found work in the O 302 coach, filling the gap between the compact OM 352 and the big OM 355.

Its most visible job came in 1969. Daimler-Benz's take on the VÖV standard city bus, the O 305, wanted roughly 200 PS from an engine that would lie flat beneath the floor, and the horizontal OM 360h supplied 192 PS, or 170 PS in a throttled-back setting. It held that post only until 1973, when the underfloor OM 407 from the new 400 series took over. The code itself did not retire — Mercedes-Benz later reused "OM 360" as an umbrella for the OM 364 and OM 366, engines that share nothing with this one but a number.