1999 E300 Turbo Diesel
 

So after putting the FRS in the garage for the winter. I've been looking around curiously at other cars and stumbled on a 1999 E300 with 149000 miles on It from a local Jeep dealership. It's going for about 6000, I'm not looking to buy it at the moment, but a family member might be interested. I've always heard that Benz will always cost a lot to maintain, but have heard stories of the pre 2000 models being built like tanks.

Anyone have any experience with an older model Mercedes-Benz? Good or bad, of course if a serious purchase was ever made, we'd have the car checked out by a certified Mercedes-Benz mechanic.

They are built like tanks, but only if the previous owners kept up with maintenance. and once they do break, it tends to cost a hell of a lot.

With proper upkeep it's common for those older Benz to reach very high mileage.

This is key

Yeah unfortunately the carfax records only show a few real maintenence records from the first owner, the car hasn't been to an auction or anything though.

Find a specialist independent shop, ask the dealership if you can take it to the independent for inspection. The inspection should be less than a few hundred bucks, if the dealership balks at the idea then they're probably hiding something and you wouldn't want to trust them anyway.

Uncle talks about how he bought one for a couple hundred bucks that was rusting away but ran fine (probably a late '60s model), went to pop the hood and the cable broke, had that car for several years and like 30k miles without opening the hood. Scrapped it when the driver's door fell off. With a post-80's vehicle I'd mostly be concerned about electrical things going kaput, especially on German built.

imo $6k is low risk, give it a shot, budget for a few big repairs and if you end up a couple thousand into it and don't trust it it's probably be pretty easy to dump for $5k and only be out a couple thousand for a year or so of driving it (cheaper than buying a new 86 and driving that for a year lol), there have been worse deals.

http://www.benzworld.org/forums/w210...y-not-buy.html