SRG Klassik

11/19/2025

https://youtu.be/HxajPWpS-Z8?si=uR_4C1csc8VHGe2Y

The Mercedes W123 is considered by many to be not just the greatest Mercedes Benz, but perhaps the best car ever built. Ive owned one for a few years but hav...

04/12/2025

Old Mercedes cars and parts wanted. Forest City NC.

03/08/2024

There had been BMW wagons in the 1960s and 1970s but they were all conversions. Usually done by coachbuilders like Euler or BINZ, or Crayford in the U.K., they were hyper-expensive small-batch machines, not something an ordinary family car buyer would choose or even necessarily know how to get. In early eighties (West) Germany, small wagons were really the domain of Ford, Opel, and VW.

Audi also built plenty of wagons, but dropped its small 80/90 estate in 1978. Mercedes had only produced one factory wagon, the W123. BMW had produced none; unless you counted the Glas-inspired 2002 Touring as a “wagon.” Despite Mercedes’ success with the W123 wagon, BMW had no plans to delve into the “family car” market with any kind of response.

This, for BMW engineer and prototype builder Max Reisböck, was not an acceptable situation.

The E30 3 Series, in the works for most of the late 1970s, opened up new body styles for the 3, but even the four-door E30 didn’t have enough room for Reisböck. He wanted to be able to take his wife and two kids on holiday and bring along bulky toys like his daughter’s tricycle in a car from his company, not one bought from a competitor. This lack of capacity was the genesis of what became BMW’s first factory station wagon: the E30 Touring.

Instead of, say, buying a 2.0-liter Opel Rekord Caravan, Reisböck bought a wrecked E30 323i sedan and designed and crafted his own wagon. This cost as much money as buying said new Opel (roughly $13,000) and took many months of welding, but the result was worth it.

Being a prototyper and a BMW engineer, he understood production constraints and wanted his creation to look factory-correct. He used precast items that could be adapted into his wagon wherever possible. That made it easier to build and, later, easier to adapt into a production-ready design.

The reason for the E30 Touring’s sloping rear window and its odd load height? The D-pillar is adapted from the sedan and there wasn’t an easy way to make a proper tailgate. On Reisböck’s car, only the rear glass opened, not the whole hatch, like on an AMC Gremlin.

The result of Reisböck’s six months of welding was a useful car that looked good and functioned at least as well as any rebuilt 323i. His colleagues at BMW, who first saw it in 1985, loved it and encouraged him to show it to management, a move he was initially skeptical about. But BMW’s senior product planners loved the car and asked to hold onto it for a while for evaluation. A production version was hastily arranged.

There were only slight differences, mainly the proper opening tailgate. Since this was a last-minute addition to the E30 universe, there were some constraints. The E30’s structure prohibited a full-width tailgate going down to the bumper, but the liftover height without any changes was too high. Instead, the production car’s tailgate opening extends down between the taillights to provide a lower point of entry for nudging things into the back, even if it isn’t full-width.

It wasn’t the most capacious wagon, but it was practical and retained all the inherent E30 goodness.

The Touring was the last E30 introduced, at Frankfurt in 1987 along with the overall E30 series 2 updates. Curiously, it was the only E30 body not sold in the USA, possibly because BMW didn’t think there’d be enough of a market to justify certifying it for U.S. sale.

It also arrived at a time when, after years of growth BMW sales cooled in the U.S., and as prices crept up thanks to exchange rates and other factors, the company’s sales continued to slump here, particularly in 1990-91. Still, the Touring was popular in most other places, including Europe and Japan.

We just talked about the “25-year rule” earlier this week, but it’s also very relevant to these little wagons. Americans wanted them from the beginning, and they’re a popular import now. The Touring’s arrival coincided almost exactly with the enactment of said rule, which made importing any vehicle under 25 years of age onerous and expensive; essentially forcing individuals to meet the same import standards as deep-pocketed manufacturers who have economies of scale and whose goal is selling hundreds of thousands of cars, not just one.

That meant that the Touring wasn’t widely seen in the USA until it was 25 years old in 2013. Since they were never imported here, in America, it’s usually the fastest versions that people bring over, but the car could be had with much of the engine range of the other E30s. It wasn’t necessarily fast, but the added weight did nothing at all to spoil the excellent balance and agile responses of the chassis.

This one is (or was) a 318i with the M10 four (~110hp), so not quite the bottom of the range, but a family machine. More than a few four-cylinder U.S. imports have had their engines swapped out for much more powerful sixes.

The base version was the 1.6-liter 316, back when BMW’s numbers actually corresponded to the engine size, unlike today’s amazing variety of models with opaque and strange designations (e.g., BMW M235i Gran Coupe, which is a 2.0-liter sedan). From there buyers could upgrade to the 320i, 325i, or best of all the all-wheel-drive 325iX Touring. There were diesels, too, but the Touring came only as the turbocharged 324td because of its extra weight over the sedans.

Wagons turned out to be good business for BMW and more than 100,000 E30 Tourings were sold.

The last E30 introduced, the E30 Touring was also the last one produced. It lasted into 1994, long after the E36 had replaced most of the other E30 3 Series cars. It also inspired the E36 3 and E34 5-Series Tourings, which were designed as part of those lineups from the start. Because of the success of all three, and Reisböck’s hard work, we’re still enjoying BMW wagons today. (Though again, not so much in the U.S., where we’ll have to wait 25 years to get the current ones. Grumble grumble.)

03/08/2024

Importing unusual foreign classics is such a popular phenomenon these days that every year media outlets make lists of “the coolest that become legal to import in 202X!” That’s all thanks to the “25-year rule,” which came about because gray-market new cars were a real phenomenon in 1980s America, particularly lower-spec Mercedes-Benz models like this 280S. This gorgeous green machine is a recent import, not one of those eighties grays, but it’s hard to fault enterprising 1970s and 1980s M-B fans for having wanted cars like this back then.

At the time, the Euro-spec Benzes were often more powerful than the emissions-strangled U.S. models, they looked better sans gigantic impact bumpers, and they were often considerably cheaper, too. Then as now, the S-Klasse was a high roller, and the gas-powered sixes, the volume leaders in Europe, were big bucks in the U.S. The carbureted 280S was only offered stateside in 1975-76, but it cost $15,000 at the time, about $5,000 more than a Cadillac Fleetwood. By 1979, the injected 280SE cost $26,000.

While not cheap in Europe either, they did cost a little less, and you can see how big spenders might want to have things their way. The quality of the car, however, never varied from continent to continent.

Often overshadowed by its W126 successor, but the W116 S-class was a car of many firsts and one last. It arguably set the stage for the W126, which evolved directly out of the older car.

The “last” was that it was the final car designed under Friedrich Geiger, who retired after 40 years with Mercedes-Benz in 1973. Geiger worked on many different models throughout his long career, but he hardly labored alone. Work on the W116 began even before its predecessors, the W108/W109, were launched in the summer of 1965.

As such, Paul Bracq, Bruno Sacco, Peter Pfeiffer, Joseph Gallitzendörfer and Gérard Cardiet all contributed to the W116’s design although Bracq had long departed for BMW by the time it reached production (he was, by then, working on the BMW E21). Unsurprisingly, the styling direction was similar to that of the R107/C107 SL/SLC, developed by most of the same people at the same time, but introduced a year earlier.

Now to the firsts. The W116 was the first to officially wear the S-Klasse distinction, it was the first turbodiesel Mercedes, the first car with modern anti-lock brakes, and the first sedan to use a new corporate style that defined the brand for more than a decade.

In traditional Mercedes fashion, it was very safe, continuing the emphasis on having the car absorb the impact in a crash rather than the passengers - a tradition inherited since Béla Barényi’s structural innovations of the 1950s (bit.ly/37tLMjV). Early W116 prototypes were a part of the Mercedes ESF safety vehicle program, which is where the world first got a look at what the production car might look like. The safety vehicle prototypes had comically huge bumper extensions, but the U.S. spec cars ended up looking rather like them thanks to impact bumper laws.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Mercedes seemed to spare no expense on engineering and quality, and like other Benzes of the era, the W116 was built like the proverbial bank vault, seemingly milled from one giant piece of steel. Over time, the newer plastic trim inside would creak, but the car was a titan of solidity by the standards of 1973.

The W116 formally debuted at the 1972 Paris show and arrived in the U.S. for the 1973 model year, very soon after it debuted in Europe rather than a year or two after as sometimes happened with such cars.

In Europe, with fuel costing much more, the sixes were far more popular. In America, the V8 was the one to have, especially as the cost of both models was so high that few buyers were really worried about spending on fuel.

Mercedes-Benz actually had no plans to sell the six here until OPEC intervened, which is why the 280S was hastily adapted to the U.S. market. The U.S. models even kept the higher final drive of the 450SE while adding American emissions and safety equipment, making them much slower than the Euro sixes. This, and its high price, meant it wasn’t a huge seller, particularly as fuel concerns faded in 1976.

Like BMW’s new big sixes of the late 1960s, it just wasn’t plush enough to play as a genuine luxury car even though many Americans now knew about the fundamental quality of Mercedes-Benzes. But for the cost of the U.S. 280S, you could get two Olds 98 land yachts and have money let over for a Fiat 128 dinghy.

In 1977, the car morphed into the fuel-injected and better-equipped 280SE, the most popular version in Europe, with 143 horsepower in federalized form. Amazingly, Daimler-Benz also went to the trouble of certifying the mighty 450SEL 6.9 for U.S. sale. At that time, such cars were usually forbidden fruit due to the high cost of making them emissions-compliant and their low volumes (and only a few hundred 6.9s were sold here).

In May of 1978, the final U.S.-spec W116 design was launched, the 300SD, powered by the OM617 turbodiesel five. In the 1980s turbodiesels would take over European mainstream motoring, but surprisingly, this model was a North American exclusive. The 300SD was appreciably slower than the 280SE but very well-timed. Just a year later OPEC II saw interest in fuel economy spike, and the 300SD quickly became the most popular S-class in North America by a country mile.

When the W126 came along in 1981, Mercedes-Benz dropped the gas sixes entirely from the American S-class lineup and didn’t revisit them until the 300SE in 1988.

While the grey market for primo Germans was still small in 1980, it seemed to grow steadily in the 1980s. Mercedes-Benz enthusiasts continued to want the more powerful, visually-cleaner Euro-spec machinery. This also applied, perhaps even more so, to BMW fans, who were often deprived of the fastest versions of Munich’s machinery because of emissions regulations.
Both enthusiasts and people simply looking for a bargain on a big Benz continued to patronize grey market importers throughout the decade, often drawing a scowl from Mercedes-Benz USA and BMW North America and their dealer networks. They probably weren’t losing that many sales to these importers in the grand scheme of things, but it was annoying to have their prices undercut or have other people outside the official channels importing faster, sleeker cars.

Also, BMW and Mercedes did not stock parts for Euro-spec cars, but the uninitiated would still show up at dealers to have their cars fixed, which led to even more dissatisfaction.

This thorn in the side of the dealers eventually prompted them to call their members of Congress. The result was that Republican Robert Whittaker of Kansas introduced what became the “Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act” in the summer of 1987, and President Reagan signed it into law 15 months later giving us the current “25-year rule” that makes importing modern cars so financially infeasible as to be prohibitive, hence the annual lists of cars turning 25.

This amazing green machine (code 860) was imported in 2021, and it’s our favorite color combination on the W116. Thanks to Dan L. for bringing it out!