Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
I was making my rounds around the internet looking for interesting cars and was taken back when I saw the photo above. Was it some kind of European Touring Car? A 24-hour endurance car? The next thing that caught my eye was the price of a mere $5,000. Now I started getting excited. A cheap, real race car for sale in the U.S. that is ready to go?
Well …
Last week I looked at a very low mileage 2001 SL500 and today’s car is another SL, although a little newer and with a lot more power. The R230 SL55 AMG was the exactly what you would expect from a mid-2000s AMG car: a supercharged V8 that makes almost 500 horsepower and just as much torque. Now 13 years and well over $100,000 worth of depreciation later, these top down monster have become very cheap. But is it worth it?
Back in September I featured the ultra rare and ultra expensive CLK-DTM that was for sale in Florida. To my surprise, another CLK-DTM popped up on eBay and of course it is my duty to report this information to everyone. Seeing as there is a handful of these cars in the United States I figured this had to be the same car. The problem was is that the original ad literally had one sentence of information. The only thing I could go on was the mileage and location. So as I compared the numbers, 2,936 miles on the car back in September while today’s car has 2,948 miles and both are in Florida. Bingo. I mentioned this to the eBay seller and to his surprise had no idea this car was listed on Hemmings back in September. His digging found that a broker was using his cars to make their own listings in order to sell this car. He also found out that the Hemmings seller also used a SLS AMG Black Series and Carrera GT of his without his knowledge either. Needless to say he wasn’t pleased and will be making some phone calls to said broker.
Now back to this car, it’s still for sale in Miami with an asking price of $425,000. I predicted that this was would be listed at over $400,000 and hit it pretty square. I don’t know if collectors are licking their lips for a 11 year-old CLK at almost a half a million dollars but then again I don’t run in the same circles of people that spend four bedroom home prices on cars either. Do I think prices will ever fall on these cars? Probably not. Is this a blue chip stock that you can sell for a million dollars in 10 years? Probably not as well. If you are looking for an ”investment car” there are plenty of Ferraris and Porsches out there will perform better, but if you are a Mercedes nut like I am, this one would be at the top of my list if I had the money to blow on it.
I usually don’t think twice when I see a Mercedes with a ton of miles on it. But I started thinking a lot more than twice when I saw a W211 E55 AMG with over 400,000 miles for sale. As I started digger deeper into this wunderkind, the story got even wilder. This E55 had a single owner its entire 400,000 mile life and managed to get into two accidents in that time with one severe enough to deploy the airbags. So obviously this W211Â for sale outside of Chicago deserves a deeper look, so let’s try to make sense of this one.
The Mercedes-Benz C215 chassis had the task of carrying on the pillar-less coupe legacy that Mercedes was known for. But seeing as this car is basically an 8-inch shorter W220 S-Class minus two doors, you can probably guess how this turned out. It departed the majority of its design language from the prior C140 and went with a much more modern smooth design both inside and out. Much like when the W220 was launched and these cars were brand new, you had no reason to think the result would end up being so poor. So let’s take a look at this 2006 CL55 AMG in Florida to see if a C215 is worth considering.
