Warning!
We have 15 years of archives. Links older than a year may have been updated to point to similar cars available to bid on eBay.
This site contains Ebay partner affiliate links, which may earn us a commission at no additional cost to you.
The last time I checked out a Mercedes-Benz W124 500E, it was none other than Rowan Atkinson’s that ended up selling for a whopping $86,700. It’s pretty clear his name had some serious value attached to it as not many W124.036s carry that kind of price tag, if any. That is until I came across these two beauties for sale in the Netherlands. One is a 1992 painted in Nautical Blue Metallic with the ultra-rare Alpaca Gray fabric and leather while the other one is a 1993 in Blackberry Bornite Metallic that there are only a handful of out there. Both of these cars are nearly flawless and as you might have guessed, carry some pretty serious price tags. But for these special examples, I can totally understand why.
Most people know him as ‘Mr. Bean’, car enthusiasts know him as the guy to crash his McLaren twice but only the most hardcore Mercedes aficionados will know him as a mutiple Mercedes-Benz W124 500E owner. This man is of course the legendary actor, comedian and screenwriter, Rowan Atkinson. Atkinson has always been known as a ”car guy” with classics like the Acura NSX, Renault 5 GT Turbo, Aston Martin DBS V8, 1939 BMW 328 and the list goes on and on. Surprisingly, he has chosen to give up two of his classic sport saloons at auction next month in England. One being the super rare Lancia Thema 8.32, the car famous for being powered by the Tipo 105L 3.0-liter V8 shared with the Ferrari 308 and Mondial Quattrovalvo and the other being this handsome 1993 500E. The W124.036 has been blue chip vehicle from the 1990s for years now, but one that has the ultra-rare cloth interior and owned by Mr. Bean? This super sedan could end up being pretty pricey once the hammer falls.
Speculation of value is a crazy thing. Some people go conservative while others shoot for the moon and see where they land. The classic European car market over the past five or so years has exploded and there looks to be no slowing down. The big winners in this market are the rare cars with lower mileage that all of a sudden everyone seems to want. Today’s car, a 1993 Mercedes-Benz 500E, is no different. Rare car, lower mileage, mega reputation and street cred leaving everyone all of sudden wanting one, and the Porsche tax added to it for good measure. The thing about this 500E is that I’ve never seen a price tag this high on the legendary W124.036 before and I still really can’t wrap my head around it. How high is it? Are you sitting down?
As a send off to the Mercedes-Benz W140 S-Class in 1999, Mercedes gave 600 S500s the treatment of the Grand Edition. All painted black, these cars had 18 inch AMG Monoblock wheels, the same hand stitched seats and steering wheel from the S600, a special birdseye maple woodgrain trim, privacy screens on the rear and back windows and illuminated door sills on top of all the standard things you got on the S500. Sticker price for these 600 cars was $89,500, a mere $2,000 more than the regular S500 — which is totally worth it in my eyes. Most of the time these older Mercedes-Benz ”special edition” cars haven’t had any impact on their value once they are past their warranty limit. But for this W140, it has been just a little different.
Who says you can’t go back in time? I think all of us at one point or another wish we could go back in time. Sure, we’d take care of all the things we regret in life but after taking care of that I think I know where the majority of us would turn: cars. Some might hurry and snag up cars that were cheap for a period of time but now are very expensive (I’m looking at your air-cooled 911s and E30 M3s) while other might go back and experience cars when they were factory fresh. A time when the problems of leaking valve cover gaskets and ripped leather seats didn’t exist. Well today, we are in luck with this car. This is a 1999 Mercedes-Benz S500 with just 6,101 miles. That’s it, an average of a little under 340 miles a year. Some of us drive that in a week. The thing is, this just isn’t a run-of-the-mill W140, the interior in this car is something I very rarely see. What is it?
