1983 Mercedes Benz 300 CD - You Got What You Paid For

As we say in the deep throes of the never-ending Pandemic, another day and another Facebook Marketplace find. Today I came across this 1983 Mercedes Benz 300CD for sale not far from our  triple-wide here on Cleveland, Ohio's far west side. Asking price is $8,000. As they say up here on the shores of erielhonan, "geezle peet". 

Here's the thing - based on its overall condition, you have to look past these amusingly bad pictures, and looking at NADA pricing guidelines, the asking price is on point. Would someone actually pay that much for a wheezy old oil burner that's mind-numbing slow, is incredibly expensive to fix and gets only so-so mileage? I. Guess. So? But that person sure as heck is not going to be me. Holy (literal) smokes. 

These days it seems that being wealthy is a commodity, well, let's be clear, appearing to be wealthy is as it's always been but whomever drove this when it was new had to "have it" since at more than $35,000 out-the-door, if they didn't "have it", their kids would go hungry. They'd go hungry too. And for what? To impress whomever? 

Today's soliloquy, however, isn't about being fiscally responsible or not but about this car that despite it being diesel powered, is still quite beguiling if not intriguing. I don't think there's an actual dollar amount that would have me go look at it in person although I'm curious as to the back story about it. Cars that sit in garages for a while do, unfortunately, tend to turn into make shift shelving. Happens to the best of us. Oh, and what's with the baby?  

Our '83 here was built on the now legendary Mercedes-Benz W123 platform. The W123, pronounced double-you, one, two, three, was not revolutionary, but “rather a thoroughly mature mid-range car combining the latest engineering with tried and tested design features”. That sober summary by M-B reflects the lasting legacy of the W123 – a solidly built automobile with timeless poise and class. You didn't get a better built car in 1983; you got what you paid for. 

Introduced in 1976, the W123 platform included a four-door sedan and our sleek coupe; C in the 300CD denoting "coupe", the "D" of course denoting "Diesel". The W123 offered a longer wheelbase than the platform it replaced, the W114 and W115 also known as the "Stroke Eight's", a wider track, and a larger body. The coupes lacked a "B-pillar" or center-post thus giving the cars their decidedly sporting Aire. Apparently the term "Stroke Eight" harkens back to 1968, the year they were introduced. Still working on what "stroke" refers to. Anyone? 

Dr. Diesel's lump first appeared when the wagon version of the W123 was introduced for model-year 1978. Displacing a healthy 3.0-liter's, the five-cylinder engine developed seventy-nine brake-horsepower and one-hundred twenty-five foot-pounds of torque. It was made available on the 300C the following year and through the end of the model's run in 1985. 

With the four-speed automatic transmission, when new, our CD here did zero-to-sixty in twenty-one seconds. That's not just slow, freundinnen, that's slower than most documented SAE minimums of acceleration speed I've ever seen. Oh, but it gets twenty-three miles per gallon and can run forever. LS swap anyone? 

In theory, at least, you could fathom that this car would pay for itself or amortize equally given that it got that much better mileage than other expensive cars in its day. Well, that may have been true to some degree back in 1978 but even by 1983, General Motors and Ford, for example, were able to give their buyers similar mileage in their luxury wares. And at quite the cost savings up front too. Then again, you got what you paid for. 

 

1985 Chevrolet Caprice Estate Diesel - Highway Robbery

Although by 1981 GM had all but worked out all or most of the kinks in them, the bottom line was any car back that was diesel-powered was a dog. And by 1985 when this impeccable Caprice Estate was new and shinier, gas prices had flattened negating most of the value proposition the improved mileage of diesel engines provided. "No-go but good mileage" worked only as long as gas prices seemed to be headed to five bucks a gallon.  

At first glance it would seem that General Motor's soft-balled development of their diesel engines as there were so many issues with the first batch of them made between 1978 and 1980. For the record I'm referring to the Oldsmobile 350 cubic-inch V-8 and not the later 4.3-liter V-6's (there were two versions; one for rear-wheel-drive cars, the other for front-wheel-drive). The V-6's, while hardly powerhouses, were much better engineered and assembled than the early 350 V-8's. Fun facts, there was also an Oldsmobile 260 cubic-inch V-8 (1979 only) that had much of the same maladies the 350 had.

Truth was development of the diesels, done by GM's long gone Oldsmbile division, began in 1973 and there was copious R&D done on them; just not enough. Couple that with GM's inherrant cost-cutting and undertrained dealership service departments and GM had a public relations fiasco on their hands right up there with the Corvair. A second generation Oldsmobile diesel 350 was introduced for 1981 but by then the die was serverely cast; diesels meant "bad". So bad that there wasn't a domestic automobile powered by a diesel engine sold in this country until 2015 when Chevrolet made a diesel engine optional on their Cruze. 

How this "oil-burner" has made it to 2021 in what appears to be original condition is a bit of a head scratcher. 

This is a shot of the odometer and, again, from the looks of things this appears to be the "right-mileage". Perhaps no-one wanted to use "grandpa's wagon" after he passed because of the diesel engine; yet no one wanted to part with it. That's as good a tale as I bet the real story is. 

Grandpa's wagon here is for sale outside Pittsburgh at one of those "sign-now, pay-later" lots with an asking price of $9,995. You know those dime-a-dozen lots dotting street corners in every rust belt town from Buffalo to Detroit; they're fronts for high interest used car loans. Hey, as long as it's legal. But asking ten-grand for this seems like, warning, pun incoming, highway robbery to me.  

We take engine performance for granted today but back in the 1980's if a car had good power, and we're talking "good-enough" power not today's over-powered "power" that even Nissan Versa's have, it was hedonistic. Figure zero-to-sixty in this thing would take roughly eighteen-seconds and that's about as slow as the Society of Automotive Engineers (S.A.E.) would allow a vehicle to accelerate back then. More fun facts: the Cadillac Seville diesel of this era takes the cake as the slowest-to-sixty vehicle ever sold; 19.5 seconds. The catalytic converter on my son's 2003 Chevrolet Malibu wore out recently clogging exhaust flow and while the engine ran fine, its pick-up reminded me of slow cars from 1980's. 

Somewhat similar to the rush to "electric's" that we have going on today, the diesel engine option on these things wasn't cheap. And amortizing the extra cost of the diesel engine over time, to me what with the drivability of these cars so relatively severe, has never seemed worth it. So, what's to become of our Caprice here? Part of me wishes I could inherit it and put a crate engine in it; this would be a bad-ass sleeper. However, dropping ten-grand or so to purchase it and then spend another five-to-six- to make it what it "could-be" sounds as foolish a spend as someone in 1985 opting for the diesel option on this thing in the first place. Sorry, grandpa.