Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
There is no greater example of a car I love but have no interest in owning than the Mercedes-Benz 600. I’ve opined for years about them and every time I see one for sale it’s a new treat. Today’s example, a 1966 up for sale in Portugal, has its surprises and little fun features that always impress me. It also carries a hefty price tag too.
Project cars are a very slippery slope. I’d say for every 100 projects that someone buys, maybe only a handful actually see the end of the line as “completed.” People love to get in over their heads in terms of what it will cost or the amount of skill it requires, with most of the time being a solid combination of both. Most of the time it is cheaper, easier, and much less painful just to buy the example you want totally original or already finished, then leave the projects for the professionals and retired folks with unlimited money.
However, there is one car that will bring anyone to it’s knees if you aren’t totally flush with cash and have a very specific set of knowledge: the Mercedes-Benz 600. I don’t need to go over the reasons why, but rather what it would take to get this 1965 up for sale in California back to its glory days. Also, this one has another little surprise.
While the M5 may have the notoriety of being the first serious super performance sedan, it’s easy to forget that Mercedes-Benz really started the trend. As early as the 1930s, Mercedes-Benz was building some of the fastest large cars in the marketplace. They were expensive, complicated, and beautiful works of engineering. It took a while post-war for both the marketplace and the company to come back to full strength, but two cars created in the midst of an international oil crisis I really think point towards the character of their respective companies. First was BMW’s hard-edged, barely disguised racer for the road, the 3.0CSL – which we sort of just looked at. It was expensive, relatively lightweight, stunning to look at and pretty quick to boot – a sporting nature that would carry through to the current generation of BMWs, still considered the benchmark in sporting sedans. On the other side of the fence was the 450SEL 6.9; who else but Mercedes-Benz would put the largest production V8 into a sedan when there was a gas crisis? If the 3.0 shouted about it’s racing prowess, the Mercedes was subtle and understated. Indeed, option number 261 even removed the displacement badge on the rear, and outside of that you’d only see hints of the car’s performance by the bulging tires and slightly more showy exhaust. But stomp on the loud pedal and the best part of 290 horsepower was on tap for you – and this was 1975. Remember 1975? It was when the base Corvette had 165 horsepower and if you wanted to just break 200, the L-82 was your only option at 205 horsepower. A full 40% more powerful, the Benz was the match for sports cars of the day in a straight line but offered extreme luxury at the same time:
Probably one of my most interesting and joyful cars to write about in my handful of years was this 1970 Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman. The short history was it was delivered new to King Idris of Libya shortly before a coup d’etat by the infamous Muammar Gaddafi. Somehow the car made it out of Libya and spent time in Japan and later came to California where it was acquired by the seller in 2011. It underwent over a $150,000 worth of work to get it into condition it is, and that is the last I heard of it in 2018.
Well, it looks like the car didn’t go into hiding as it was featured in Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, then recently went up for bid on Bring a Trailer as a premium listing from the same seller. After the dust settled, someone named MalibuScott became the new owner for $300,000 all in. Truth be told, I thought that was a very nice price for the new owner. Looking at the amount of time and money that went into this car, I don’t see a big profit for the seller unless he got this for a song when it was sitting. Fun to see this one come up again, and maybe not the last we’ve heard from it.
Its hard to imagine a car that was more sought after and requested by the truly elite of the world than the Mercedes-Benz 600. I don’t need to regurgitate over and over again all the well-known individuals who owned these cars as I’ve done that in the past, but if you want to read about some of them, go nuts. Naturally, with great power and wealth comes with certain expectations and certain requests made to their favorite luxury car maker. I’ve seen some pretty crazy stuff that the Mercedes factory honored the request of, but today’s modification was so nuts that the Mercedes factory flat out said no to.
Nubar Gulbenkian, an Armenian oil tycoon, had a taste for eccentric luxury cars to say the least. He commissioned Rolls-Royce to build him some truly wild stuff and naturally asked Mercedes to do the same with their 600. The thing is, Mercedes said no. Why? Well, Gulbenkian had a thing for cars with fully transparent roofs. He had a 1956 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith with a transparent Perspex roof, among other body modifications, that is truly a one-off. The story goes, Mercedes wouldn’t do it on the 600 because the structure of the roof isn’t entirely flat. So bending a giant sheet of glass on a car that is constantly flexing and experiences temperature swings isn’t something they wanted to dive into nor stand behind when it breaks. Tycoons usually don’t take no for an answer, so Gulbenkian ordered a standard 600 through a fake name and asked coach builder Henri Chapron in Paris to do the work. In additional to adding the roof, they covered the entire interior in leather and added other little touches like tobacco pipe holders on the front seat backs. I told you this guy was eccentric.
