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For years, Mercedes-Benz has fed its U.S. customers a diet of ever-more-powerful engines in its E-class sedan. It's been decades since the forebearer to today's E-class had a four-cylinder engine behind its signature radiator grille - at least in America. Our lowliest E-class Benz, which isn't so lowly at all, has instead come with a six, with a V-8 as the move-up engine, and, for a time, a supercharged V-8 in the AMG version, which has since switched to a normally aspirated big-block (6.2 liter!) V-8.

When the famed Paris-Dakar rally was canceled in 2008 as a result of terrorist threats-not to mention the murders of French tourists and Mauritanian military personnel along the rally route-it seemed that perhaps an era had come to an end. For the first time in three decades, there would be no testing of man and machine against the rigors of the grueling Sahara Desert. But for 2009, rally organizers regrouped and looked west. Far west. The 2009 Dakar rally's new venue was a 9578-kilometer (5952-mile) run through the belly of South America. From Buenos Aires, Argentina, the route headed south to the shores of the Atlantic; west across the Andes to Chile and the Pacific Ocean; and north to the Atacama, the world's highest and driest desert; before swinging east across the snow-capped Andean spine to follow a southerly track that ended back in Buenos Aires. The reimagined rally drew some 500 entries from around the globe, and 271 of them finished: 113 motorcyclists, 91 car teams, 54 truck teams, and 13 quad riders.