Our car guy wants you to get off the armchair carback bench
From early on in this column, and early on in my career, I’ve talked up the many reasons to own semi-old German cars, from around 1970 and later. Before that they’re also great, but largely priced out of reach.
I owned a couple, kind of. I had a pair of 1973 BMW Bavarias that I never quite got running, so never got to experience them as transportation.
By the late 1960s, Germany was emerging from the shattering poverty of the Postwar era and beginning its transformation into the industrial engine of Europe that it remains to this day.
There was a desire to display their manufacturing prowess to the world, and a middle and upper class with disposable income and an appetite for domestic luxury products.
Combined with the engineering skills of a generation whose talents were once turned towards evil and the corporate will to excel at any cost, the result was the highest quality automobiles ever constructed, particularly those from Mercedes-Benz.
The era of what I consider the truly great Mercedes runs from 1965-1996, a period during which engineering uniformly came first, and a number of models were so expensive to engineer and build they were sold at a loss. So naturally, last fall, I bought one from one year after that era, a 1997 E420.
What had changed for Mercedes was one sort-of word, Lexus, which was undercutting Mercedes by more than $10,000. The response was a new, less expensive “W210” chassis, anathema to the faithful. However, there was one solace, the engine in the E420 called M119.
The M119 was an all-aluminum, DOHC V-8 operating at 11.0:1 compression that whipped out 275 hp and 295 lbf.ft of torque. That’s not stunning today when you can get that from a Chevy V-6, but in ‘97 it’s the same power you got from the 5.7-liter engine in a Z/28 Camaro. It was absolutely state of the art.
Despite the cost cutting, it was still arguably the finest car in the world—or maybe even because of it. Tauter and with styling that graced the cover of the New York Auto Show program that year, it holds the road far better than anything that size should.
What it was really designed for, though, was solving the equation where gasoline=distance. The 18-way pneumatic seats in my 22-year-old car may be funky; it may eat brakes and the wiring may be aging; but it remains unparalleled on the highway.
I knew what I was getting into with my E420. It’s old and it was very expensive and very complicated in its day. Old, expensive and complicated components are not known for aging well.
Nevertheless, it has exceeded all my expectations by being a car with a soul. It’s hard to define how that happens and I’m not entirely sure you can even build that in on purpose.
Maybe you need a few flaws and compromises to highlight what’s truly good about a car. Even as the writers of the time were mourning Mercedes’ cost-no-object past, they still heaped praise on it.
When Motor Trend concluded their one-year test of the car, their publisher couldn’t let it go—after being hammered on by journalists for 17,000 miles, he bought it.
Whatever spirit you can put into a piece of machinery, it’s still got it today.
David Traver Adolphus is a freelance automotive researcher who quit his full time job writing about old cars to pursue his lifelong dream of writing about old AND new cars. Follow him on Twitter as @proscriptus.