Hammer Time: The Unwanted Car
It just sat there. A car that so many enthusiasts could appreciate, a grey market 1978 Mercedes 350 SE, just collected springtime pollen on my driveway. I had a helluva deal on it. Back in 2008 I had bought it for only $325 already ‘restored’. A dealer in the North Georgia area didn’t know what to do with it and decided to clean out his inventory for the month end. That was the good news. In fact that was great news since I always wanted an old European gasser Mercedes. The bad news was that I just could not stand driving that thing.
I couldn’t figure it out at first. The outside looked exceptional in silver with the Euro headlight assembly and a thousand dollar paint job. The classic W116 even came with a top notch stereo system with built in speakers integrated into each one of it’s doors. The prior owner even kindly replaced the fluids, put on those wonderful wool seat covers that are given on old Benzes, and kept everything in tip-top shape except a small customary crack on the windshield. But when I drove it? It was a buggy and expensive bastard that had all the excitement of a plain-jane land barge from the pre-Reagan era.
All the needles on the dashboard were loose at first. That got fixed in a day. But then there was always something to do. For starters, it drove like a 1980’s Lincoln Town Car. Boring. Just dead-bone boring. The car smelled like horsehair because that’s what Mercedes put in the seats at the time. 30+ year old horsehair. The MPG’s were solidly in the teens at a time when gas was over $4.00 a gallon. Shocks had been replaced to improve the ride. But it didn’t matter. I kept the car as a driveway ornament and eventually sold it on Ebay.
Other unwanted cars have come my way. A de-clunkered 1985 Town Car with only 45,000 miles? The most boring vehicle I ever owned. Even went so far as to nickname it ‘Novacain Incarnate’. Mid-90’s Camry and Corolla models have always struck me as the bane of banal. Any other models? Pretty much any under-engineered compact sedan. The big three had dozens of them in the 1980’s. While those models found a bit of power by the 1990’s, their Japanese and Korean competitors were even worse. Fun? Hell, I’m just glad to see all those four wheeled refrigerators properly recycled in the crushers. Which brings on the questions. Did you ever have an unwanted car? Why did you dislike it so much?
More by Steven Lang
Comments
Join the conversation
I was in Florida for a week and ended up with a light blue Ford Tempo rental car. It was only a rental but that week seemed like a year in that POS. There really was not a single redeaming quality in that thing, ugly, dreadfully slow, recalcitrant transmission, mushy yet harsh suspension, uncomfortable seats, greasy plastic interior... seriously, who ever willfully bought one of these after test-driving anything else?
I had a 94 Taurus that I inherited from my mother in law that was astoundingly boring. The woeful 3.0 was completely neutered by possibly the most inefficient automatic of all time. Passing gear meant lots of revs and engine racket accompanied by the acceleration of a 63 VW Beetle. My son's high school car was a 91 Chevy Lumina that could boast a better power train than the Taurus, but everything else had fallen apart by 120K. The dash cracks could swallow sunglasses.