Junkyard Find: 1978 Mercedes-Benz 300CD

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

Mercedes-Benz W123 coupes aren’t so easy to find these days, though I was able to spot this Crusher-bound ’78 280CE last year. Last week, in a different Denver-area yard, I ran across today’s find: an oil-burning ’78 300CD.

With the 3-liter OM617 five-cylinder diesel engine, a strong contender for the Most Reliable Car Engine of All Time Award, these things usually get scrapped only when they get too ugly to be worth fixing. 236,529 miles isn’t much for one of these cars.

The W123 coupes were sort of frivolous purchases at the time— if you wanted just two doors in your German luxury car, you were expected to get a BMW 6 Series and maybe a gold razor-blade medallion to get tangled in your exposed chest hair.

This one isn’t rusty and the body is pretty straight, but fixing the trashed interior wasn’t worth the cost to its final owner.







Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • Darkhorse Darkhorse on Dec 02, 2012

    I've owned two 300DTs in my life. They were slow but great cars built like a Tiger tank and got great mileage. My only issue was the drawback of diesel fuel. Smelly and corrosive. All 300Ds started to leak and if you didn't track the leaks down you were in for trouble. I still have potholes in my asphalt drive way from my last leaker.

  • C-bird C-bird on May 20, 2014

    Hi all! I registered so I could talk about the 300CD. I owned a couple built about a month after the one pictured: same blue colors. Those who talk about the slow start are absolutely right, but once you got the beast up to 85 miles per hour you could drive 700 miles before stopping for fuel. I picked up my aquablau '78 300CD in late 1977 and drove more than 725,000 miles without a major repair - yep, the transmission was just fine in 2006. I bought more batteries, starters and alternators than you can shake a stick at, and replaced an annoying number of pneumatic controllers for the A/C and cruise. But, if you cared for these engineer-designed cars, kept the fluids and filters changed regularly and scrupulously, they would outlast you. Mine was stolen out of our garage in Florida. We didn't know it was gone for 4 months - and by then it was too late to track down: she was in pieces. Few days go by that I don't think about replacing her, but there's no way another would live up to my expectations.

    • See 1 previous
    • Cdnguy Cdnguy on Sep 11, 2014

      c-bird. I just registered so I can reply to you. I recently bought a 157k 300cd that had a single owner for 30 years in Palm Beach. Then I found one closer to me and don't want to ship the Florida car. This one would live up to your expectations. Silver with blue interior. 1985 300cd for sale in Miami.

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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