Junkyard Find: 1982 Mercedes

If you owned a car that had traveled more than 400,000 miles during its life, could you bear to send it into the cold steel jaws of The Crusher? In the course of my junkyard adventures, I've found

If you owned a car that had traveled more than 400,000 miles during its life, could you bear to send it into the cold steel jaws of The Crusher? In the course of my junkyard adventures, I've found quite a few vehicles that met such a fate. Here's a very solid Mercedes-Benz W123 oil-burner that now languishes in a self-service boneyard in Phoenix, Arizona.

417,046 miles is about the same as traveling 16-¾ times around Earth (using a great circle route, of course), and that distance is impressive even by Mercedes-Benz diesel standards.

417,046 miles is enough to get this car into 11th place in the Murilee Martin Junkyard Odometer standings. Remember that 1985 W123 with 411,448 miles we saw in a Denver car graveyard a few years back? That car has been pushed down to 16th in the MMJO list.

Don't worry about a lack of Stuttgart iron in the MMJO Top Ten, Mercedes-Benz fans, because there are three at the moment:

For those keeping nationalistic score, that's two cars built in Sweden, three built in West Germany, three built in the United States (the Sentra and the pair of 1990s Hondas), and two built in Japan. I'm sure there would be more Mercedes-Benzes on the list if junkyard shoppers didn't buy most W123 and W126 gauge clusters within days of hitting the yards, and more American-marque machinery if Detroit hadn't stuck with five-digit odometers until well into the 1990s.

Here's the legendary OM617 five-cylinder turbodiesel engine that got the job done so well. A junkyard customer showed up to extract the injectors while I was admiring this car.

This one was rated at 120 horsepower and 170 pound-feet, which wasn't a lot for a car scaling in at 3,585 pounds (fun fact: the current C-Class weighs quite a bit more than 1982's proto-E-Class). However, its naturally-aspirated sibling, the legendarily slow 240 D, had just 67 horses and 97 pound-feet.

American Mercedes-Benz shoppers in 1982 could get the 240 D with a four-on-the-floor manual transmission, but a four-speed automatic was mandatory on the U.S.-market 300 D.

It appears that the first chapters of this car's life took place on the roads of Southern California. Amato's Auto Body is still in the same location in San Diego shown on this sticker; the seven-digit telephone number suggests that the sticker is of 1990s or earlier vintage.

The sticker from Heinz Geitz's repair shop in La Jolla led me to a lot of interesting tales of the life and career of Herr Geitz (who passed away in 2017 at the age of 97). After spending most of World War II in a Soviet POW camp, he emigrated to the United States and took a job working for Mercedes-Benz here. In 1956, he became crew chief for Augie Pabst (yes, from that Pabst family), then migrated to La Jolla during the 1960s. His grandson founded HG Performance, a Mercedes-Benz tuner shop in San Marcos, that exists to the present day. You'll find plenty of history in the junkyard if you dig a little bit!

Cars that live near the Pacific in California can get some terrifying top-down rust from salt spray mixed with morning fog, but this car has just a touch of corrosion around the rear wheelwells from rainwater leakage past the trunk's weatherstripping.

The interior appears to have been in nice condition before junkyard shoppers bought most of the door panels and seats.

MB-Tex fake leather is amazing stuff. Ordinary upholstery would have been nuked into powder by four decades in the climate of San Diego and Phoenix.

In the end, even the BVM couldn't save this car from its junkyard fate.

The timing of the turbocharger-toting technician walking the banked oval worked out well for everyone involved in this commercial.

1982 Mercedes-Benz 300 D W123 in Arizona wrecking yard.

[Images: The author]

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I honestly thought the only thing that would kill a car like this would be a severe accident. Someone loved this car, and it's too bad to see it torn apart, left to rot in the sun. 40 years from now, I can guarantee that no one will look at a current E-class and say the same thing. Today, they just aren't built to the same standard, and all of the electronics will have fried out ages ago.

I remember driving something like this (don't remember the year) but it was a larger M-B diesel. And it reminded me of a locomotive chugging along uphill. It wasn't quick by any stretch, but the combination of diesel torque and transmission just gave you this solid, steady feeling that it was going to make it, even if there was a 1/2 mile of traffic backed up behind you! It didn't feel tired or winded. And nothing beats a 1980s era Mercedes door solid slam. Bank vault.

And I want to meet the person/people who drove the 1990 Sentra over 440,000 miles. That is a level of pain and cruelty that would have European Dark Ages executioners saying, "Man...that's rough!"

Bill on Curious Cars has had several of these that he has reviewed. One was a diesel station wagon which had about as many miles as this car and it was in pristine condition. Maintenance is the key to keeping these on the road for decades. I am not a Mercedes lover but I respect these and many of the older Mercedes which were built to last. As for slow I drove a 1980 Datsun 210 with a 5 speed manual back in the early 80s that would give this Mercedes a run for its money on being slow. Except for the body those old 210s would go for hundreds of thousands of miles. Mechanically simple.

We also had a Datsun 210 'Sunny' of that vintage. Base model with an auto transmission as the only option. Used it as a runabout/courier type vehicle. You are correct in that although 'outdated' in design it withstood considerable abuse with few complaints and remained entirely reliable.

I'm right smack in the middle of Generation X, and with the exception of some automotive diehard fans in Generation Y, I think my generation is the last to experience what a Mercedes and to a lesser extent, a BMW really was. It meant rock hard seats with that really specific and one of a kind plastic/leather aroma that only M-B had. It meant a slow shifting transmission attached to an engine that would last an eternity and pull for days. It meant dashboard buttons that made a solid "click" sound when one was pressed. Real wood, thick carpeting, durable leather, and a presence that only the M-B star hood ornament could provide. Looking out over the long hood and lining up the horizon through that hood ornament - that was driving a real German car.

That feeling is gone now. Instead it's tap/tap/tap on a cheap feeling, tacked upright screen accessing more menus than your settings pages on Windows 11. The buttons are sources from a cheaper manufacturer and they are shared with cheaper cars. While the engine is far more powerful and efficient, the underhood components are far cheaper, with plastics that become brittle and wear out far sooner than older M-Bs. And the days of lifting it up, replacing and cleaning a few things, and then you just got another 80,000 miles out of it are long, long gone. I don't think 16 year old gearheads today are going to wax poetic about a current C or E (or worse...GLB) class like we do with these 1980s era Benzes. They've become disposable cars - meant to last then length of the lease and no more. It becomes a suckers bet when some guy with a credit score lower than a Philadelphia area code (thanks for that one RCR - love that line!) who wants to look rich gets an 100,000 mile one off of a BHPH lot. You can imagine every horror movie with the old guy on the porch warning the idiots not to do what they are going to do anyway.

Rant over. I just hate seeing an old Benz die like this.

The 210 engines were very durable and just required routine oil and filter changes. Very simple mechanically and very easy to get to the spark plugs to change. With a 5 speed manual the engine was under stressed. I drove my brother's 210 for a number of years and it routinely got 40 mpgs are better. Despite the 210 having slow acceleration I was very fond of it.

I had a classmate in high school who sometimes drove his parents' 1985 300TD, which was the wagon version of this car, also equipped with the turbodiesel engine. His father was a very successful surgeon, and I think he is one today too. He believed that the 300TD was an extraordinarily fast car that would easily beat my Mom's 1987 924S in a race. The race never happened, but there was no convincing him that his diesel wagon could be beaten by a car that could cover the quarter mile in three less seconds on its way to a thirty mile per hour top speed.

A few years ago, a friend and I revived a 300D Turbodiesel like this one for another friend. It had been sitting for a few years following the unexpected death of her husband. We got it running in short order, and apparently diesel fuel ages much better than E10. By 2018 standards, it was not a quick car.

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Junkyard Find: 1982 Mercedes