Many people remember back when Arnold Schwarzenegger was interested in getting a Hummer to cruise around in. Initially, he was told by AM General, the maker of the military version, that it couldn’t be made street legal. But the Terminator wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and he purchased one and set out to prove it could be done, spending about $100K of his own money to make it street legal.

Being a bigger than life star he was one of the pioneers in huge vehicles for celebrities, and basically invented the street legal Humvee. But with nearly three times the emissions of a normal vehicle, the bid was on to make the Hummer more environmentally friendly, so he began to modify some of them in his fleet. One was converted to run partly on hydrogen, and another ran on bio-fuel. he was quite proud of his conversion.

After becoming Governor of California, it was probably not sending the proper message to have a fleet of Hummers that weren’t exactly environment-friendly, and he did sell off his entire fleet. All along, however, he felt that people don’t need to get rid of their big vehicles just because of a few environmentalists, and wanted people to simply learn to adapt in an effort to undo what we’ve done for the past few decades.

Now that he isn’t focusing his sights on the affairs of the state, he has decided on another vehicle that is larger than life. Recently, he toured the facility where the Unimog is built in Germany. This one, like the Humvee, is not a vehicle intended for street use here in the US. The Unimog is very well known for it’s off-road capabilities, but the top speed on the Unimog U1300 is about 60 mph. So he had the customizing firm Mertec, in Germany, customize his Unimog to the tune of a quarter million bucks.

We’re sure Schwarzenegger had to do some creative legal work to get this vehicle registered in California, because they aren’t legal here in the U.S. It probably doesn’t hurt that he has some credentials. So is the Terminator star going to reinvent the wheel, again, and get the Unimog legalized on US soil the way he did with the Humvee? Time will tell, but it’s probably fair to say that after ditching his Hummers, Arnold is back.