OM79

The OM 79 sat one rung above the OM 77 in the same program and was built the same way — pre-chamber injection, water cooling, Gaggenau assembly, 710 kg dry — but with the bore opened to 115 mm on the same long 165 mm stroke for a little over ten liters. It produced 120 PS at 1,600 rpm and, more to the point for a lorry, 56 kgm of torque at 1,000 rpm. Offered against the identically sized M 78 petrol six in the L 5000 range, it became from 1933 the senior diesel option in the L 8500 and O 8500 three-axle chassis.

Its most visible work came at the top of the weight range. The Daimler-Benz archive records an OM 79 in a forward-control L 10000 special chassis carrying a KUKA refuse body — a ten-tonne payload municipal machine of a kind few manufacturers could supply in the late 1930s. It also had the last word in a much older model: in 1937 the OM 79 became the final engine fitted to the O 4000 low-frame bus chassis, which was dropped from the range at the end of that year after nearly a decade in production.