Derek, you’re a lifetime MB fan and enthusiast - but in the nicest possible way you’re eccentric and must realise that you’re out of touch with the general population
Hardly anyone wants to drive a W124 and as they’re not made any longer, they wouldn’t be able to even if more people did. If you buy a W124 someone else is losing one so what are they going to drive?
Think how much money you must have spent in fuel driving hundreds of thousands of miles? And imagine how much most people would have to spend on repairs - labour rates are usually quite high at garages and they won’t be rebuilding window regulators etc.
If everyone started driving old cars into major cities the rules would be changed to stop them.
Sometimes you have to move with the times, that’s what most people do
I don’t really think I’m eccentric , I just grudge paying other people to do badly jobs I can do properly myself ; I have a healthy distrust of most garages because most of them are cowboys and have had jobs bodged more than once .
That others haven’t learned basic mechanics as most everyone did when I was young isn’t my fault or my problem; I think it’s sad that so many people don’t know one end of a car from another and are pretty clueless at anything beyond putting fuel in .
Back in the days I did 100,000 miles plus a year driving all over the country , it was mostly for work and I actually made money on it . Since the pandemic I’ve done few business miles , and my personal mileage is of the order of 15,000 pa , one of the reasons I got the E220 this time round was the fuel economy and combined with the recent price hikes for petrol and that I’d be paying for it myself , I went for the smaller engine this time round : I now put in maybe £80 twice a month as opposed to £130 two or sometimes three times a week ( but again I used to get all of that back in mileage claims , and even made on it ) .
In my earlier days most of my cars did sub 20mpg , sometimes sub 15mpg , but I remember petrol being 50p a gallon …
Cars don’t need to be old to need window regulators replaced : I did my first W124 front window regulator when the car was about three years old and still under 100,000 miles , and my sister went through multiple ones on her Ford Mondeo when the car was still practically new ( plastic gears constantly wore out ) . I never had to do one on any Merc older than a 124 , but by the time the 124 came out so many such parts had been cheapened so they would only last around 100,000 miles , but still can be cheaply rebuilt ( guys on here used to weld new metal back into worn quadrants then grind back to the correct profile for the teeth . That the repair kits for the rear ones are abundantly available shows that many other people repair them too .
Perhaps I’m unusual that I overhaul my failed ones and put them away for re-use , but I like to have the part to hand to do the job quickly .
I still see the likes of 190s , 123s and 124s on the road regularly, followed a 124 saloon out to Glasgow Airport on Tuesday night , and generally see similar cars a few times a week if not every day , so there are still plenty of people actually driving them as well as merely wanting to .
Many that come onto the market now are the results of bereavement , as with many other cars , and like the one Spike started the thread about a week or so past . In many other cases there are people who like to rescue cars that have been laid up , so no one else needs to lose out .
A lot of Mercedes that are in the region of 20 , 30 or 40 years old are just on the cusp of being collectible , and are also the last cars that don’t need computers to determine what’s wrong , or expensive electronic modules to replace ; most of the relays or simple ECUs in the older cars don’t tend to suffer from much more than dry solder joints and are in most cases easy to fix .
Later cars , with so many electronic components are not so easy to fix , so they may end up being scrapped first .
I can keep the cars I run , running at very little cost to myself , so for those of us who choose to run and maintain older cars , not just M-B , there is very little reason to change them .
Oh , and we aren’t getting any hike in VED next year ; prices for all pre 2001 cars will remain unchanged , so suddenly an R129 SL 500 will be hugely more attractive than a R230 version , paying half or less of the annual VED .
