What’s under the hood matters more than the emblem
About a year ago I bought a cheap, used German luxury sedan, a 1997 Mercedes-Benz E420. With a 275hp V-8, world class leather and wood interior and 54,000 miles, it cost me…$3,100. No, there aren’t any zeroes in the wrong place. And no, there wasn’t anything wrong with my car.
It pulled like a train and ran like silk, and everything worked. It wasn’t even expensive to own—it got 25mpg (although it needed premium), and while I did have to put $1,000 in brakes into it, I did the shocks myself for $100 each. It was the most satisfying car I ever owned.
On October 21st, it became far more expensive. There was...an incident, while driving to the doctor before work. All the dash lights and gauges died, and while the car was running fine, I decided to perform the most basic of troubleshooting: I turned it off and then on again. This time, the dash lit up with every warning lamp it had, and the car wouldn’t shift out of first gear.
After a morning of whining around town at high revs, I took it to my downtown shop where they eventually pulled a code P1747. I narrowed that down online to one of about fifteen transmission-related issues, probably a bad sensor but maybe also a short in the dome light, a turn signal stalk, or something just loose somewhere.
All it would take to figure it out exactly would be a tow 30 miles to a Mercedes shop with their special STAR diagnostic computer and an unknown number of hours of labor at $125 an hour.
Which is why my car is still sitting outside the garage downtown (thanks, Keith!) and why I am now driving a Hemi Dodge Magnum RT. I’m hoping to get $1,500 for the Mercedes, because aside from a $20 sensor somewhere, there’s a hell of a lot of car left. And yet.
It only takes a minute on Craigslist to see what’s going on. There’s a 2004 Mercedes-Benz S500: MSRP was $85,920; now $6,500 OBO with 83,000 miles. There’s a 2006 BMW 750LI with 81,000 miles for $6,400; base price when new $75,800 before options and most went out the door over $85,000. Or a 2009 Audi A8 L with 42,000 miles, asking $9,999. That was an $80,000 car ten years ago, a smooth $7,000 a year in depreciation. A comparable Lexus LS460 from the same year is literally twice as much. The simple reason is that the Lexus doesn’t break and the others do. A lot.
My car, and almost any other German (or English, or Italian) luxury car made in the last 20 years isn’t worth fixing, which is a problem, because BMW and Audi in particular are notoriously fragile. If you have the time and money, you can do it for sentimental reasons, but I didn’t have either.
As beautiful, fast, sophisticated and fun as it is, it has to go to make room for a Dodge muscle wagon that I always wanted anyways. Built during Daimler’s ownership of Chrysler, it benefits from a dash of German sophistication on top of a big hunk of Detroit brawn.
I’m not worried at all, not even a little, that it’s got a Mercedes transmission closely related to the one they put in my old car.