Mercedes-Benz L 1113

The Mercedes-Benz L 1113 was a medium-heavy two-axle lorry that Daimler-Benz built at its Mannheim plant. Production began in 1959 under the designation L 322, the truck was renamed L 1113 in 1963, and it stayed in production until 1984. It was sold as a flatbed or tipper truck with or without all-wheel drive, as a tractor unit and as a chassis for special bodies, and a forward-control version was built as the LP 1113. The design was the short-bonnet compromise that came out of the German Seebohm rules on truck length: Daimler-Benz wanted a light truck with a large load bed without committing to a forward-control cab, which in the late 1950s had not yet proved itself with customers. The designation encodes the gross weight in tonnes in its first two digits and a tenth of the engine output in PS in the last two. Engines were the OM 321, OM 322 and later the direct-injection OM 352, all water-cooled inline six-cylinder diesels, with a turbocharged OM 352 A offered from 1966. Between 1982 and 1991 the German federal government bought 602 of them as LF 16-TS fire engines.