I was visiting the bird space. A rare visit since doofus took over and trashed the place, but I slum every now and again and while I was there, I saw a Car and Driver comparo from 1992.
One of the cars featured was the iconic Mercedes 500E which was appropriately oohed and aaahed over but still coming in second place to the BMW M5 only because the Porsche assembled Benz was monstrously expensive at 88k in 1992, which when converted to 2022 dollars via the CPI calculator is 186K- Luxury pickup truck money today.
But I’m not here to talk about the 500E. I’m speaking of its incognito sibling the 400E, one of which I owned for four years.
A few years before the 400E I owned a 300SDL. This car:
With its 3 liter turbocharged diesel, the 300SDL was no rocket by any means, but it was very reliable… until the vacuum operated transmission really began to act up. Aware even then that fixing Mercedes cars can easily run into the thousands effortlessly, I donated the rennpanzer to the California Automobile Museum and bought myself a MK2 Celica Supra P-type, but that’s another entry.
Fast forward to middle 2017 and all of a sudden I was the owner of a 400E, purchased from the original owner who kept all of the records but had grown disinterested in the car and had let it sit for the better part of a year. $1200.00
Didn’t seem like a lot for a car with one owner and 133k; Mercedes of this era were renowned for their ability to go many times around the odometer, and reliably.
Provided one kept up with the maintenance.
The first hit was when the ignition coils went out. Most manufacturers figure that an ignition system is gonna be there for the life of the car. Not Mercedes. The ignition system on the 400E , two coils, two distributors and other bits will wear out. That was 800.00 and a couple of months while I tried to loosen the 3mm allen screws that held the distributor rotors onto the distributors. Once those screws were free, and the rotors replaced the car was mobile again, until it came time to smog it.
The second hit was when it was discovered that the EGR passages were coked up and the cats were done. 3000.00 later, the car was smogged. In between were a few oil changes and replacement of a vacuum switch for the transmission, which cured the hunting between gears.
There was no third hit. I was contemplating the rebuild of the transmission and tracking down and fixing the many fluid leaks and replacing the window motors and sunroof cables and cabin fan motor and resistor when I figured that I was done with this rolling restoration project and found a newer car, one built in the 21st Century, and not in Europe.
I sold the Mercedes soon after, listing it on FB marketplace and watching it drive off that night. I sold it for $700.00 to a bedraggled looking fellow heading up to Weaverville who arrived with his companions in a Chevy squarebody pickup with a weak battery.
I don’t regret selling the car, and I learned an awful lot from it, especially the adage: ” There is no such thing as a cheap Mercedes”. I already knew this, but sometimes a lesson needs to be paid for.
Here’s a review of the car when it was new: https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a4212109/1992-mercedes-benz-400e-by-the-numbers/
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