A popular Russian vlogger recently made international headlines after purposely burning his expensive Mercedes-AMG G63, because he was sick of it breaking down all the time.
Russian media reported that young vlogger Mikhail Litvin bought his brand new luxury car in December of 2019, for a whopping 13 million rubles, or around $170,000. For that kind of money one would expect both performance and durability, only Litvin claims that his Mercedes-AMG G63 was really short on the latter. Despite having allegedly driven it only 15,000 km (about 9,300 miles), he claims the car has been in and out of repair shops over the last 10 months. Exasperated by the constant need for repairs and the manufacturer’s reluctance to accept responsibility, the Russian vlogger decided that the best way to solve things was to simply burn the car down to a crisp.
According to local media reports, Mikhail Litvin’s car had been in the Mercedes service shop four times since he bought it, and every time the Mercedes dealership reluctantly accepted to cover repair costs, only to return the car to him without actually fixing the problems. The vlogger claimed that, at one point, the dealership refused to fix the car, so he took it to a friend’s shop, where he discovered that Mercedes had used aftermarket parts instead of OEM ones on a previous repair.
Fed up with having to spend money on expensive repairs for a virtually new luxury car, Litvin decided to get rid of his Mercedes-AMG G63 in a bombastic way that would both draw attention and make a statement. So earlier this month, the young vlogger drove the car to the middle of a field, splattered it with gasoline both inside and out to the sound of dramatic Russian music, before lighting it ablaze and attempting to drive off in an old ZAZ 968m that eventually needed pushing.
The video was clearly planned in advance, and edited for an added dramatic effect, which is not at all surprising considering that vloggers make a living on views that generate advertising revenue. Still, I don’t think Litvin would have set his car on fire like this if he didn’t actually have problems with it. Sure, it was a way to go viral, but at the end of the day, he still burned $170,000… He could have just sold it and cut his losses.
This sort of stunt isn’t really new. In fact, in China, where the quality of luxury vehicles has been notoriously bad over the years, people have been staging this sort of spectacles for a long time. A few years ago we wrote about a Chinese man who used a donkey to haul his luxury dealership back to the dealership, as well as about this frustrated owner who smashed his Maseratti with a sledgehammer.
