North Korea's fake Mercedes ended up becoming one of the weirdest cars ever created

The story of North Korea and its fake Mercedes, known as the Pyongyang 4.10, is one of the strangest chapters in automotive history.

In the 1970s, the secretive state tried to copy West German luxury sedans in an effort to showcase technological prowess.

The result was a car that looked like a stretched Mercedes-Benz but drove more like an outdated Soviet model.

Today, the Pyongyang 4.10 is remembered less as a triumph of engineering and more as a symbol of the country’s isolationist eccentricity.

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The fake Mercedes was typically reserved for party elites

The Pyongyang 4.10 was developed by Sungri Motor Plant, North Korea’s main automaker at the time.

It was allegedly a copy of the Mercedes 190 (W201), although few saw the car close enough to be certain.

The car was widely believed to have been reverse-engineered, although a minority claims that it was simply a rebadge of the Mercedes vehicle.

The name ‘4.10’ was reportedly a reference to 10th April 1987, the day Kim Il Sung, the first leader of North Korea, announced that North Korea would have its own car industry, like South Korea.

This cemented the car’s role as a propaganda tool, rather than a practical car.

Few were ever built, and those that did roll out of factories were typically reserved for party elites.

For everyday transport, North Korea continued to rely on imported Soviet vehicles and even a small number of Western cars.

North Korea committed Grand Theft Auto

The Pyongyang 4.10 isn’t North Korea’s only unusual automotive story.

In the 1970s, the country ordered around 1,000 Volvo 144 sedans from Sweden.

The cars were delivered, but North Korea never paid the bill, leaving Sweden with an unpaid debt worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Decades later, the Volvos are still reportedly driving around Pyongyang, a rolling reminder of one of the strangest cases of state-level car theft in history.

Years later, North Korean hackers would steal $620 million worth of cryptocurrency in a brazen cyber heist, keeping the ‘tradition’ going.

North Korea has also tried to build military-style off-road vehicles modeled after older Soviet and Chinese designs, though these too were often based on outdated technology.

Unlike other nations that developed independent automotive industries, North Korea’s attempts have largely been imitations or adaptations rather than original innovations.

Today, the Pyongyang 4.10 is virtually impossible to find, and surviving examples are rare.

However, its existence is quite ironic.

Instead of representing modernity and power, it ended up being remembered as a fake Mercedes that fooled no one.

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