Junkyard Find: 2001 Mercedes-Benz ML55 AMG
Published: September 14th, 2020
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Since trucks, truck-shaped cars, and generally truck-influenced vehicles dominate American roads in the present day, it’s about time I started paying attention to high-end luxurious German truck-like machines in the vehicle graveyards I frequent. Such machines have been easy to find in such places for quite some time now, due to the notoriously quick depreciation of large-dollar German cars that don’t get the meticulous maintenance they deserve, but prior to today, we’d just seen a single BMW X5 in this series. Let’s go right to an AMG for our first Mercedes-Benz SUV: this 2001 W163 ML55 AMG.
The price tag on this truck, soon after the turn of the century, started at $65,900 (about $101,150 in 2020 dollars). That was better than twice the cost of a loaded Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer.
But Ford wouldn’t sell you an engine like this in your Explorer back then: a 5.4-liter OHC V8 rated at 342 horsepower. This engine made the ’01 ML55 the fastest SUV in the world at that time, and it could run the quarter-mile in the high 14s.
As you might expect, no manual transmission could be had in this truck. Five-speed automatics went in all the ML55s.
You know Full Depreciation has arrived for a vehicle when its owner feels comfortable slapping stickers from cannabis dispensaries on the windshield. Such stickers have become very prevalent in the junkyards of weed-crazed Colorado, and I even find junkyard cars with bags of wacky tabacky still inside.
There’s also a sticker from a firearms silencer manufacturer on the dash, because why not?
Plenty of the AMG interior goodies had been grabbed by junkyard shoppers prior to my arrival, but hints of this M-Class’s once-opulent high-speed luxury remain visible.
Like getting together with four friends and shooting yourselves into a Wile E. Coyote mountainside with a giant slingshot!For links to more than 2,000 additional Junkyard Finds, check out the Junkyard Home of the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™.
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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This first-gen M-Class was garbage. Plastic overpriced junk, even when brand new.
"Like getting together with four friends and shooting yourselves into a Wile E. Coyote mountainside with a giant slingshot!" As a former owner of a Mercedes AMG of this era, I can assure you that maintaining this after the warranty expired was a lot scarier than that slingshot ride!