For as long as I can remember, the sign that one “made” it was a Mercedes-Benz, and specifically a convertible one. Sure, if you wanted to go fast you bought a Porsche, and if you wanted to go in the snow you bought an Audi – or if you wanted to do what everyone else on Wall Street did, you bought a BMW. But there was a royal air about Mercedes-Benz models that the others couldn’t really capture. Perhaps it was the long and storied history of one of the most significant automobile manufacturers in the world – a car company that had been selling the best cars in the world to the stars since the 1930s. Perhaps it was the incredible build quality of many of their models; cars not designed to a price point, but to an engineering standard unsurpassed anywhere in the world. Or perhaps it was just simply that the cars Mercedes-Benz managed to make you feel incredibly special, incredibly pampered and yet not be ostentatious or overstated. In truth, it’s probably a little bit of each, and few cars embody this combination of qualities quite as well as the W124 Mercedes-Benz did. You could have economic diesels, versatile estates, sporty V8 monsters, or enjoy the limitless sky the cabriolet version offered you:
