Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
Last week I featured a Mercedes with a giant V12. Today’s car is no different — although with a little more factory flavor. This 1998 S70 AMG hails from Norway in case you even needed to outrun a herd of reindeer. But in all seriousness, this W140 is a rare breed. It was, in typical S-Class fashion, a money is no object car. More importantly, this car continued its life like a money is no object car. So let’s take a better look at this world traveler S70 AMG.
Before the world of Porsche Cayenne Turbo, BMW X5M, and Audi SQ5, there was the W163 ML55 AMG. It was the quickest, fastest, best-handling and quite frankly the baddest SUV we’ve seen since the days of the Lamborghini LM002. The mad men at AMG decided to go borrow a couple a M113 engines from the E55 and squeeze it into the normally tame ML-Class. Then they threw some giant 285/50/18 tires on to keep it under control. They didn’t forget bulging fender flares to cover those massively wide tires either. What this left us with was a ML that would run 0-60 mph in 6.3 seconds and top out at over 150 mph. I’m trying to picture the faces of the workers in Alabama when this thing showed up from Affalterbach for final assembly. So let’s take a look at this 2001 ML55 AMG located in Miami.
Yesterday I was doing my daily rounds searching for interesting cars and scrolled upon a 1965 Pagoda. I looked at the price and saw $19,995 (more on this later) and my eyes got really big. The going rate for a decent Pagoda is about $50,000, so my finger was creeping awfully close to the ”Buy It Now” button. Everything looked good, no major body damage, the interior was nice despite an aftermarket CD and air conditioning system. But that all could be sorted out easy enough. It had a clean title and only a little over 39,000 miles. Maybe I did just stumble across a Pagoda from someone who still prices cars from a book they keep in the top drawer of their desk. Everything looked like I was going to Pagoda owner until I saw what was under the hood.
During my searches around the internet for cool cars, every once in awhile I run across an ex-utility vehicle that catches my eye. This is one of those vehicles. A 1969 Mercedes-Benz L408 G Auxiliary Fire Van. Originally commissioned for Fire Department of Heide in Northern Germany, this van has all the pros of owning a fire vehicle without all the cons of owning a fire truck — most notably finding a place to park it. So let’s take a deeper look at this cool old van up for sale in Santa Barbara, California.
Back in 1993, if you hopped down to the local Mercedes-Benz dealer and asked for a 600SL, they’d gladly give to you — in exchange of giving them almost $130,000. If you somehow were dissatisfied with the car in terms of performance, you called up Mercedes super-tuner RENNtech and told them to do their thing with it — in exchange of another $60,000. Now doing some quick math here, we are at a grand total of around $190,000. Keep in mind we are still talking in terms of 1993 money. To put that in perspective, that’s over $316,000 in 2016 dollars. And you thought a drug addiction was expensive! So what did this insane amount of money buy you?
