Man, when a Mercedes runs 0-60 in 11-seconds and gets praise for it you know two things. Firstly, it’s a diesel. Secondly it’s from a galaxy far, far away called the 1980s. This video review of the 1987 Mercedes-Benz 300 TD is pretty awesome as it is an amazing perspective adjustment for anyone who sees it. For starters, with inflation this thing would be selling for about $108,000 today and secondly, the “royal” weight mentioned for this diesel station wagon places it within a couple hundred pounds of a modern Camaro!
We’re not bagging on these cars. The W124 platform was a freaking tank and these machines can still be seen clattering along and around the streets of places that the salt worm doesn’t proliferate from. The diesel engines in these cars were engineered to the max and while they were slow, they certainly didn’t lack fo reliability. In fact, the first cars I ever saw running on “bio-diesel” were old Mercedes diesels on the campus of college. It was hippie hot rodding to see an old Benz and then smell a fryolater as it went by.
Just yesterday while driving my son to work, we saw a modern Mercedes wagon and we both were digging it. The modern cars have little to do with something built in 1987 other than the fact that they both appear on the evolutionary chart and some tiny morsels of the W124 DNA have persisted through time as all good ideas do. Putting us in the same moment back in ’87 we’d likely both do the same thing and say, “Hey…Mercedes wagon…” again. That’s cool in my book.
