Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
I’m all for wild interiors. Give them to me all. If it is between beige or turquoise, I’ll take the turquoise any day of the week. Although the caveat here is that it has to make sense. I don’t want any Ronald McDonald-looking interior or some creation from “Crazy Rick’z House of Leather” that the fourth owner decided to go with. Today’s car, a very rare 1997 911 Turbo S, has one of those wild interiors. Although different, it misses wildly on one thing.
Even though Porsche produced almost 200,000 G-Series cars from 1973 to 1989, that doesn’t mean they are getting any less expensive. Looking back ten years ago, you could grab a regular Carrera coupe in the $25,000 – 30,000 range be totally content with your purchase. Today? Double that. This is the reality of buying cool old sports cars in the year 2022 and it seems like there are plenty of buyers out there for them. Today’s car, a 1986 Carrera coupe in White Gold Metallic surely has all the looks, but the price? Well, it’s tough to swallow.
Sometimes things just don’t make sense. The Mercedes-Benz R-Class is one of those. When it launched, it was compared to a bad minivan with ugly styling and a crazy price tag. The R350 rang in north of $50,000, while a loaded up R500 4MATIC hit $70,000. That is a lot of money for something that doesn’t look the price, and the quality was average at best. The interior was just a lot of parts-bin stuff and was very much form-follows-function. One would think that would equal almost no demand for them in the used market given Mercedes expanded their SUV lineup massively and updated everything around them. However, the prices they are still bringing in the used market some 15 years later say that is not the case.
I love seeing creative solutions people come up with when factory options aren’t enough. Sometimes they are brilliant, sometimes they are half-baked, and sometimes they are a little bit of both. Today, we have that “little bit of both” recipe on this 2003 Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG. The story was the previous owner didn’t care for leather seats, and since leather was the only way to go on the R230, they did a custom cloth setup. Truth be told it doesn’t look all that bad, except this previous owner wanted one more special request: the largest headrests I’ve ever seen in my life.
The 2016 model year was the last for the 981 Porsche Cayman chassis, and you know what that means: Random special editions that no one has heard of or really even asked for. This is the Cayman “Black Edition” that was just a handful of options packaged together and some “Black Edition” door sills. There were no performance additions or even suspension upgrades. We probably saw this coming as there was a 2012 Cayman Black Edition which was, you guessed it, the final year of the 987 chassis. They really don’t do anything to resale value other than a “that’s interesting” passing comment since it literally is just a bunch of pre-selected options, but hey, those door sills are cool, right?
