This week we’ve got something that, like the centre section of Shed’s double bed, has hardly been used in recent memory. It’s a 1998 Mercedes E320 Avantgarde petrol with 73,000 miles on the clock.
When you say it like that it doesn’t seem all that special, but 73k in 25 years is under 3,000 a year and more remarkably it’s taken twelve years to do the last 3,000. The last owner bought it in 2004 as a six-year-old car with, Shed is guessing from the MOT history, probably 50,000 miles on it. From that history, we can see that from 2005 to 2011 the new owner was doing around 2,000 miles a year in it, and in some years fewer than that.
In 2011 the mileage graph really began to flatline. 300 miles were covered in 2011-2012 and 280 miles the year after that. Things ramped up briefly between 2013 and 2015, when 850 miles were clocked up in the first year followed by 1,400 miles in 2014-15, before the annual mileages dropped to (roughly) 60, 50, 30 and 10. Just enough to get to the MOT station and back. There was a quick squirt of 200 between 2019 and 2020 but in the last three years it’s gone back to an annual average of twenty miles.
Sorry about the numberwang there, but cars with such a low mileage normally wear exotic badges and sit in a climate-controlled environment drily gathering value. Our Shed is a £1,789 commoner’s car that’s been living the life of an exotic for the last couple of decades.
There's good and bad about this kind of motoring lifestyle. Spending as little time as possible on the salty roads of Britain should have given the W210 E-Class’s notoriously rust-prone bodywork a better chance of not dissolving, and that seems to be the case here. It’s hard to be sure from pictures and with dark paint to deal with too but Shed is going to stick his scabby old neck out and venture the opinion that this might be one of the least rusty W210s north of the Mediterranean.
Not driving a Mercedes for years on end might have seemed like a kindly policy to some long-term owners but it’s not necessarily the kindest treatment for these cars, which after years of pampering often respond well to a good old Italian tune-up on the dual carriageway.
Problems can arise on the 221hp/232lb ft 3.2 V6 with oil and coolant leaks, spark plugs, coils, water pumps, alternators, engine mounts and sensors of various flavours. Timing is by chain, which was fairly foolproof. It was a good idea to change the guides and tensioners after 200,000 miles or so, but the oil was best changed somewhat more frequently that that. The five-speed auto could leak and there could also be issues with the conductor plate if the fluid hadn’t been changed often enough (every 40-45,000 miles of so).
When it was in good shape this powertrain gave the 1,580kg E320 a 7.7sec 0-62mph time, a top speed of nearly 150mph and an average fuel consumption figure of around 27mpg. Pre-’96 W210s still had the old 217hp straight six which gave you a sense of heavy-flywheeled muscularity that wasn’t quite as obvious in later V6s like our Shed’s. Diffs could leak, signalled by weird sounds from the back of the car. The hydraulic self-levelling suspension that was only standard on the estate was brilliant as long as it wasn’t leaking.
Inside, the Avantgarde spec gave you that peculiar dull grey wood that someone at M-B thought looked great back then. Today, from a distance, it looks like plastic that’s had boiling milk thrown at it. The seats and door cards were covered in an equally nondescript but usefully bombproof textile. The cabin design was determinedly old-school and all the better for it. Build quality generally was excellent, although the steering column cover could work its way loose and the sunroof – not present here – wasn’t always rattle-free. Window regulators and brake light switches conked out, as did the ignition switches and instrumentation pixels on models that had them. As an old-time W124 owner, Shed refuses to acknowledge the existence of pixels. He believes only in things you can touch and feel, like a speedo needle, the postmistress’s suspender belt or Mrs Shed’s saucepan, not some here today, gone tomorrow electronic sprite.
Although the headlight lenses on this car look fresh and clear they do normally cloud up with what the MOT testers like to call ‘product’. They have to call it that because nobody knows what it is. The total number of advisories in the last seven years is four: two for worn tyres and two for the same non-working stop light.
There were echoes of the preceding W124’s outstanding solidity in the W210 but its paint quality wasn’t so good. If the next owner of this one wants to keep it nice they will need to either keep it out of the rain or follow the previous owner’s example of not driving it very much. Throw in a potentially sellable registration number and this Merc saloon starts to look like a good catch at under £1,800.
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