For about fourteen months, in the early 1990s....I owned a 1980 Mercedes W116 luxury car (roughly 14 years old).
Everything about the interior was five-star and luxury status. Gas-hog? Well....yeah....a 3.5L engine....8-cyclinder.
It was the only automatic that I owned in my life.
The deal to get it? Well....this is the strange story.
This well-to-do German guy in Bitburg bought it new and drove it for about two years....then had a heart-attack. His wife put the car into a barn, and there it sat....till 1992....for almost 10 years. The fenders on the driver's side? All rusted up from salt. The mileage? Probably 30 percent of what the normal car of that era would have had.
My boss offered up around a thousand dollars for the car to the widow and she accepted....mostly to just get rid of it. Between the battery and tune-up....my boss put 500 dollars into it. He kinda talked the base inspection guy to just overlook the fenders (serious holes in it).
A year later, he was leaving and offered me this 'deal'....a satellite receiver (with the dish) and the car...for $200. I couldn't pass up a deal like this.
The car? It drove like a million bucks. The fuel consumption? Well, you had to put up with this issue. The shifting from 1st to 2nd, to 3rd, and 4th....the smoothest that you'd ever experienced in your life.
For around fourteen months I drove this 'cruiser', and then the axle broke. The mechanic started talking about three to four thousand DMs, and I just said 'enough', and the car went to the junk-yard.
I kinda regard that car as the best vehicle purchase of my life (plus I got a satellite TV receiver with the deal).
2 comments:
Wow, great story !
To be honest i have not heard of a Mercedes Benz to need an axle to be replaced so soon, maybe the rubber boot got ripped or punctured and allowed water to penetrate, this is very rare, i have seen W123s with 400k running on original transaxles -drive shafts. I had myself a rear wheel drive when i was young a BMW 3 series and i really abused that car you would not believe it, and the transaxle was great, it never let me down, i think it is probably one of the last things to break on a RWD vehicle.
This car sat in a barn for more than 10 years, with no real protection (wasn't even washed as the husband had died, so salt took out the fenders). Extremely low mileage, which made it appealing to me. Had a great feel on the autobahn (easily getting up to 180 kph). Odd negative was awful green color...I've seen others around from that era (same color used)...must have been some trend going on.
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