Sure we didn't have access to the money and technology that kids do now, parents were always worried about unemployment or not paying the bills (I grew up in the north remember, not the more cushioned south). We were in the last dying days of traditional manufacturing, dirty clothes after a 10 hour shift and none of the Health & Safety nonsense that goes on today. We did odd jobs down the seafront for a £1 an hour if we were lucky. We had smelly kids at school that got taunted for it (but not that often to be honest?), teachers didn't do too much about it, you were posh if you had a racing bike with 14 gears and we never saw parents outside the school gate picking kids up in cars.. even the paedophiles probably did what they did on foot?
It was all somehow less complicated and I liked it.
So it is with cars. Beyond the really old 1960s British sports cars, I am generally stuck in the 80s when it comes to admiration for nice cars. A lot of kids in my town - and yours I am sure - grew up with posters of either a red Ferrari or a white Lamborghini on their walls alongside the Deborah Harry posters. Tacky? Maybe. Of the time. Most definitely.
Even in the 90s this image remained. KRS-One a not particularly materialistic rapper chanted 'Mercedes Benz and Range Rover outta here...' on one of his first solo tracks in the early 90s. Proper Range Rover's mind, not the stupid space age re-designed ones or RR Sports that chav dads aspire to these days.
And so it is to Mercedes Benz.
The E Class in particular. Probably, no definitely!, the most memorable car from my childhood. In the middle of the 80s, at the time I was getting ready to leave school and start those first few poorly paid jobs, it was the symbol I aspired to in the car world (though I did have the white Lambo poster until I was about 13 or 14). Either a Mercedes 320CE (the W124 shape/chassis if you are a techie Mercedes nerd) - this was a pillarless, two-door coupe in the massive saloon chassis (see pics below) - or the cream of the crop the SEC. This was again a pillarless coupe but shared the S Class chassis (W126 for the nerds).
This car could be drvien today and still turn heads yet it is 25 years old!
Note the lack of pillars between the front and rear window sections.
Coming from a relatively small place I knew nothing of the 500E at the time. A now very rare beast created in cooperation with and assembled by Porsche. It used the 5 litre 32-valve V8 Mercedes engine that also pops up in the 500SL sports roadster of the late 80s/90s. Here's a very well known one in deep metallic burgundy (Lady Diana's 500SL).
Nowadays I am fortunate to drive an E Class as a non-winter car (try driving a rear wheel drive car of this size in slippery, icy road conditions where I live if you dare) - extremely fortunate in fact because it's my wife's car and she's as mad about Mercedes as me!
A new Mercedes Benz E Class has just been released (August 2012), the E300 BlueTEC Hybrid. A hybrid engined big Mercedes. Now our 5 yr old one regularly gives us 44 mpg but imagine what he hybrid will do, and how quiet it will be in town traffic when not using that combustion engine? The engine is a 2.2 litre diesel (strange as the 300s have all been around 3 litre engines since their introduction) but there's also a 20kW electric motor onboard powered by a 19kW Li-Ion battery. To put that in perspective, the battery in a modern smartphone is about 5 watts of power against the car's 19,000 watts, or 3,800 times more.
So, how efficient is it then? This is where it gets crazy. The car can accelerate from 0 - 62 mph in 7.5 seconds, reaches 150 mph on the right road or track but still gives close to 66 mpg.
Typical that I am not fortunate enough at the moment to be able to go to the dealer and swap ours for a new one. Not that I would. Buying new cars really is for mugs. Best advice in the world is to wait a few years and let someone else take that initial hit on depreciation. A golden rule for almost all - the saving is clearly huge with a big and expensive car but is still large (and in % terms can be larger) when you consider the heap (word used very intentionally) of cheap Korean and Malaysian cars that are flooding our streets these days.
So, see you in a few years when I'll post a review of the all new 2012 Mercedes E Class.
Hopefully..
Or get yourself to autotrader and pick up a 300CE 24-valve for around £4,500 to £6,000 (25 yrs old and still worth a fair amount.. show me the cheap Far Eastern one that will be at that age?). The SEC's regularly sell for £7,500 upwards on a mid-80s plate. Bargain!
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