This find comes into us from reader Randal. We have seen some pretty solid prices for factory Benz wagons of late, but here is a chance to get your hands on an earlier conversion.
The Crayford wagons are fairly well known cars in the Mercedes estate circles. I came across one in June of 2009 that was seen on GCFSB. While the car didn’t sell the first time, in January of 2010 BringATrailer found it listed again and ran a post on it. It sold for $23,000.
These conversions were tailored to an owner’s specific tastes and were done to a high standard. From the era before the venerable Mercedes TD & TE, they were unlike anything available directly from the factory. Interestingly Crayford cars retained their original Mercedes warranty.
This particular model comes out of the Texas estate (pun intended) of Eddie Chiles. It has 73,000 miles on the clock and has recently been serviced to bring it back into a daily driver level of service. It features the U.S. quad, headlights, one of the differences from the previously mentioned car.
This car features a really interesting L shaped third row bench seat, the seller says that this feature is unique to this car only.
The car needs someone to give the inside, outside, under the hood, etc. a good cleaning. I’m actually surprised the current seller did the mechanical work on the car, but decided against cleaning up some of the grime. Some relatively simple elbow grease could pretty easily add a $1,000 to the sale price of this car.
This specimen is not as nice as the one that sold for $23,000, but bidding is already up over $16,000. I suspect we’ll see resistance at just under $20k for this one, but with a car of which less than 20 exist it only takes a few people who want one to do strange things to the auction price. A neat piece.
~Evan
Sold at $18,600.