I’ve come upon this one a little late as there isn’t a lot of time left in this auction, but it’s a wild and interesting…
3 CommentsTag: Cabriolet
Have you ever looked at the McLaren F1’s centrally mounted seating position and thought to yourself, “Yes, this is what I need for my everyday commute”? Well have no fear because a solution has presented itself under the guise of this otherwise fairly basic 2010 Porsche 911 Carrera S Cabriolet. The cliche is that a picture is worth a thousand words so I will leave it to the pictures to describe this Carrera’s transformation. I won’t lie, things get a little weird.
CLICK FOR DETAILS: Centro 911 2010 Porsche 911 Carrera S Cabriolet at Atlanta Luxury Motors Roswell
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Last week I looked a CL63 AMG in a nice shade of green and a few weeks before that I looked at a very nice W124 Cabriolet. So today we’ll combine the two and check out this seasonal 1993 300CE covered in Spruce Green for sale in California.
CLICK FOR DETAILS: 1993 Mercedes-Benz 300CE Cabriolet on eBay
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One thing that amazes me about the W124 cabriolet is how expensive it was when it was new. In 1995, when you drove into the lot at your local Mercedes-Benz you didn’t have a ton of choices. You only had the C, E, S and SL compared to the 16 different models now in 2016. If you made your way to the E-Class lineup, you had the E300D, E320 and E420 in sedan form. (Sadly the E500 was axed after 1994). If you needed to haul some stuff, there was the E320 wagon. If two doors were more your speed, you could either go E320 coupe or cabriolet. Now you think the prices would all be somewhat comparable since hey, they are still all E320s, right? Well, not so much. The standard E320 sedan came in at $43,500 while the coupe was $63,000. Now the cabriolet, you ready for this? The MSRP price was $79,000. Just for kicks, the 1995 SL500 was under $90,000. So why did the cabriolet run almost twice as much as the sedan? Cost.
To make this car perfect, it’s not just as easy as chopping the roof off and adding a soft top in the trunk. Over 1000 parts had to be changed or modified from the coupe to be at the standard Mercedes wanted. The A-pillars were welded together with metal inside the pillars to form a stronger unit in the area that is prone to buckling. To combat vibrations, there are a system of dampeners in the front and rear of the car as well as the roof frame. In addition to all that, fitting an automatic top was no easy task as the roof mechanism has 27 linkage parts and 34 joints. Mercedes manged to make a perfect top and still left you with a generous amount of room in the trunk. All of the designing, all of this engineering and all of these materials combined with labor made this car so expensive. Clearly, Mercedes has figured out a way to keep costs down now because a 2016 E-Class coupe is only $2,400 more than the sedan and the cabriolet is only $8,000 more than the coupe.
CLICK FOR DETAILS: 1995 Mercedes-Benz E320 Cabriolet on eBay
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The one-year only Guards Red 1983 Porsche 911SC Cabriolet we featured in late September remains up for a reserve auction. It’s consistently received a bid or two on these auctions right around $50K and now sits with a BIN price that is a little lower than when we first featured it. It’s still a lot of money for a 911SC, but given the low mileage and that these were the first year Porsche produced a Cabriolet for the 911 perhaps it may finally see a sale.