Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
Sometimes a car comes along of which I feel totally unworthy. Such is the case with this one-owner, impossibly mint 1982 Mercedes-Benz 300D for sale in Portugal. Looking quite sharp in its white over blue combination, you’d be easily mistaken to think this car was a restoration job. But it isn’t. This 300D is a survivor. And when one talks about the W123, survivor is quite an apt term, because these cars will simply go on and on and on…
EDIT 3/25/16 – Thanks to our reader Mark who alerted us that this car is misrepresented since he actually owns #4. Further detective work by our readers has shown this is actually an M540i number 3/32 but without its original M540i details. Thanks to our knowledgeable readership for scrutinizing!
Here’s a rare slice of BMW M-car, one of the 32 examples of the Canada-only E34 M540i. These were built by BMW Individual at the time, and were a far cry from the badge-happy ///M340iMsportEfficientDynamics, creating the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too of 90s Bimmers by taking the E34 M5’s chosen-one suspension and brakes and mating it with the 540i’s grunty V8 and 6-speed fun-lever.
So, sounds like an amazing find, especially with a No-Reserve Auction starting at $4,999. A shockingly low number for such a rare 5er, but its had 10 owners in just 101.5k miles, and it needs shocks, springs, mounts, fan shrouds, cosmetics… it needs. The interior looks to be in good shape, as does the trunk, but the engine bay remains a mystery. If you’re handy with the E34 platform, you’ll probably have a wealth of options to take get it awesome, but you could probably have a sharp-looking, now intelligently-modified M540i that lives up to its name.
“This is not the greatest E28 in the world, no –
This is just a tribute.”
Yet again, the “Manofied Racing” Alpina tribute – a well thought-out and thorough interpretation – is back on eBay. It popped up twice a couple of years ago, a few months apart, but obviously had no bites at $32,500. Two years on it has received a respray but lost its Alpina stripes on everything but the front and rear flight decks. Despite the impressive boom in the ’80s BMW market, this one apparently didn’t get to set whatever price the seller deemed more than generous. It’s down to $25k now, but I’m guessing a low-$20ks offer might get a serious discussion started.
-NR
While we look at collector-grade automobiles more often than not, it’s always nice to ponder driver-quality cars too. I’ve made the conscious decision several times to not buy the nicest example of a car that I could find, instead trying to rehab a car that had been languishing and might otherwise have been forgotten. I’m now on my fifth example of this, and while economically it might not be the best plan there is something rewarding about salvaging a car and bringing it back from the brink. However, usually such examples are priced accordingly; I bought my 1984 GTi for $300, for example, and the same amount bought me a 200 quattro Avant about a decade later. Once I paid a staggering $800 for a Golf with nearly 200,000 miles on it, and the seemingly decadent V8 quattro set me back $2,000. All gave me lots of automotive joy – not the get in, nothing is wrong type, but if you cue the Sarah McLaughlin and sad puppy dog eyes roll across the screen, I can see the hope in salvation of nearly every car. There’s always something that’s good, right? In the case of today’s quarter-million mile Scirocco, there’s a lot that’s good:
I’ve always been somewhat intrigued by the Porsche 968 Cabriolet. Before SUVs and sedans graced Porsche’s lineup, this was a bit of an outlier, a car more suited for cruising than its hardtop sibling, yet packing the same potent large displacement inline-4 under the hood. Someone decided to turn this formula up to 11 with this example we see here for sale in California. This 968 Cabriolet packs a supercharger, with an output of over 300 horsepower. Mated to the preferred 6-speed manual gearbox, this can make for some seriously fun al fresco motoring.
