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I think the days of picking up a nice W124 Mercedes-Benz coupe for very little money is probably over. I remember only a few years ago where a decent example could be had for $4,200 or so and everyone would leave happy. The last year or so? Not so much. Most have been trading in the $10,000 ballpark with some really nice examples selling for much more. Yes, you can probably find a handful of 300CEs that need some love for much less than 10k, but how much as you spending to get it back up to snuff?
That brings me to today’s example, a 1990 up for sale New Jersey that has just over 100,000 miles on the odometer. It looks to be well looked after and not beat up at all. But I think the problem with this car is interesting color scheme of Signal Red with the slightly darker lower cladding. Is it garish? Probably. Is it old enough where a crazy paint scheme is now considered cool? Maybe so.
It seems like every so often a car pops up that somehow has completely fallen off everyone’s radar – including the owner. Usually it is some story about how they were bought for a business but shut down suddenly and everything was left as-is, or how an owner bought the car and suddenly passed leaving the car sit while the family had other things to deal with. Sometimes you might hear about how someone bought a car and stashed it away thinking it’ll be worth big money sometime in the future. As a result, most of these cars have but a few thousand miles – maybe somewhere in the hundreds – but I can’t recall seeing too many cars with this few miles.
This 1988 Mercedes-Benz 300CE up for sale in Poland has just 98 kilometers on the odometer. For those who live their lives in miles, that is roughly 60. That’s it. How did this happen? I don’t know. The seller says that this car was originally sold in Sweden where it sat in a barn for the past 30 years before somehow ending up in Poland. It has never been washed and everything is included from when it left the dealer’s lot. Problem is, this C124 isn’t exactly a time capsule as you might have noticed by the photo. On second thought, it maybe is a time capsule, only one of those that wasn’t sealed correctly and when they dig it up to open it, everything inside is ruined from water damage. Yes, that’s more like it.
If you want to get into the Mercedes-Benz W124 world but don’t want to pay the big prices that the 500E/E500 commands, there are a few other options if you need that little extra bit over a standard offerings. Mercedes did just that with the Sportline option on the coupes, sedans and even the estate cars, and it gave you a more that just some cool little badges. While you didn’t get a horsepower bump, you did get a bunch of revised suspension components, wider wheels and tires, a quicker ratio steering box and a smaller steering wheel. Worth it? Probably so. Visually, you can’t really tell a Sportline car from a regular W124 outside of those little badges, so when hunting for these cars you do really need to have a keen eye when searching through the mass of W124s for sale at any time. Thankfully, people are starting to recognize these cars are more desirable to some and thus listing them as Sportline cars, like today’s car – a 1993 300CE with just 39,000 miles. Problem is, this dealer outside of Chicago is asking a ton of money for the honor of that badge. How much? Well, you’re well into 500E asks here:
Here is something I don’t see all that often. This is a 1993 Mercedes-Benz E36 AMG Cabriolet. If you are asking yourself why you never see these cars, it is because they are incredibly rare. The W124 E36 is exactly what it sounds like, a W124 with a 3.6 liter M104 from AMG with some cool bumpers and wheels. For as German as Mercedes-Benz is, they are dreadful for publishing production records on cars that aren’t worth a million dollars. Although maybe they just aren’t very open with sharing their information either. From what I understand, under 200 W124 E36 AMG cars were produced during the last few years of the W124 production run in the sedan, coupe, cabriolet and estate bodies. Of the less than 200, 57 officially went to the UK as right hand drive models and the rest were scattered around the rest of the world. Much to no ones surprise, none made it to the North America. Today, we have an E36 AMG Cabriolet up for bid in Illinois. Except this car isn’t one of those 200 cars. Please stay with me here.
Last week I looked at a 1994 Mercedes-Benz E320 Coupe that had a ton of potential, but I just couldn’t commit given its long list of aftermarket parts that weren’t very flattering in my eyes. From the looks of it, the readers felt the same way judging by the comments that echoed my points. Today, I found another W124 Coupe that not only is stock (outside of a Blaupunkt headunit), but is actually one of the nicest C124s I’ve ever come across. This 1993 220CE up for sale in the Netherlands is a model that was never sold in North America and is quite unique thanks to a few options. This 220CE is powered by the M111 inline-four that is also found in the W202 C220, a car we do have in North America, and makes a surprising 150 horsepower for being as basic as it is. All this is nice, but the real reason I am here is because of the beautiful Malachite Green, both inside and out.
