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.
Tag: M104
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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Back in the 80s and early 90s, when AMG was an independent tuner not yet folded into the Mercedes-Benz family, those looking to soup up their Benzes could have their cars delivered to an AMG-authorized dealer for the installation of a range of body, suspension and engine upgrades. As a result, there are a number of “mix and match” cars from the period with bespoke configurations, making the authentication of pre-merger cars today quite difficult. The most famous car from this period is probably the “Hammer,” the AMG-tuned, V8-powered, wide-body kitted version of the W124 platform E-class (there’s a neat little video of Chris Harris driving one here). While the Hammer continues to be highly sought after, and priced accordingly, less well known is that AMG also produced a tamer version of the W124, the 300E AMG. This offered the brutish exterior styling of the Hammer while retaining the M104 six cylinder engine, bored out to 3.4 liters.
CLICK FOR DETAILS: 1991 Mercedes-Benz 300E AMG on eBay
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I really enjoy a well done engine swap. Three months ago I featured a W113 Pagoda with a M104 3.2 inline-6 swap. Today’s car is another M104 swap but with a little more displacement and a lot more AMG. What started out as a nice W124 E320 wagon was transformed to a hybrid C36/500E/E320 borrowing various parts from both cars. It’s a unique build that I haven’t seen and sure is an improvement over what Mercedes offered from the factory. So let’s take a closer look at this uber W124 wagon for sale in Connecticut.
CLICK FOR DETAILS:Â 1995 Mercedes-Benz E320 Wagon 3.6 AMG on eBay
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To continue on the theme of non-traditional colored R129s, today we have a SL320 that not only has a unusual exterior color but an inside has a color hereto unseen on the legendary Mercedes roadster. In 1997, decided to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the SL with a special edition SL320 and SL500. All painted in Quartz Blue Metallic, the 6-cylinder SL320 is more rare with only 250 examples produced while the SL500, those all painted in Crimson Metallic, had twice as many with 500 being built. Apparently Mercedes-Benz felt that special exterior color wasn’t enough to set these cars apart. So let’s find out what is inside this 40th Anniversary Edition for sale in Florida.