1985 Mercedes Benz w123 280ce Coupe

1985 Mercedes Benz w123 280ce Coupe

I’ve always liked this car. The rich people where I grew up (North Shore of Long Island) always drove w123’s (until the w124 came out). I mostly remember wagons and coupes.

This car has an interesting story. I found it on Craig’s List. Listed at $2,000 if I remember correctly. It was owned by a Mercedes enthusiast. I thought is was priced low and decided to buy it to flip it. It was a beautiful shade of metallic baby blue with a tan interior. When I went to see the car you could tell it has been re-painted. I didn’t think it mattered too much, it still looked good. It was a grey market car imported from Germany, and had some cool non-US market features like heated cloth seats and power front windows, but manual rear windows. It had an inline six cylinder gas engine. This engine was not available in the USA for the 1985 model year. Only the diesel was sold in the USA for the 1985 model year. The engine ran quite noisily, the previous owner telling me that it might need a valve job, though he said he just tried to adjust the valves himself. There was ALOT of valve chatter. It could have been the wrong oil viscosity. I added a hood pad, in hope that it would help quiet the engine down, but it didn’t help much. It also ran at a high RPM at speed (60 mph). I’m not sure if this was normal, or if the transmission was not shifting up.

The previous owner told me that he found it on a side street in Fort Worth and bought it for $1,500 (I think). He put some work into it and wanted to sell it to get a diesel. I offered $1,800 and he accepted. When i went back to his house to get the title signed, his new diesel 190 was in front of his house with an oil pan full of oil under it. He said it needed some work but he was driving it.

When i got the car I could tell, from the smell, that the car leaked. It would cost over $500 to replace the seals, so that was out of the question. But it had to stay in the garage. I kept in the hot Texas sun for a couple of days to try to dry it out, but it didn’t help much. The car didn’t really need much. I cleaned it up a bit, brought the black trim back to black, and waxed it, and cleaned the interior a bit. Some of the interior wood trim was cracked a bit. I had to refurbish that a bit. I also bought a set of CoCo mats for it.

I got classic plates for it and drove it in a Mercedes Club of America rally. It was lots of fun.

After I got the title in my hand I sold it on ebay for $3,600, exactly double what I paid. Of course I did have a few expenses such as the hood pad and I put a new distributor and rotor on it.

The thing that bugged me the most about the car is how much it looked like my dad’s 1960’s Bel Air Coupe. His car was a similar color and the roof line to trunk was also very similar. My dad’s car sat in our garage for years, in a non-working state. I hated that car. And so, this car, was just too similar to that one. And I also didn’t like how it drove on the highway. It was just in too high of an RPM. Driving it around town was fun though, but that’s all it really was, an around town car.

It is a nice pillarless coupe though.