John, I understand your point of view but I would also like to take up the cudgels for slightly older cars in terms of reliability. We have a Mercedes W124 220CE from 1992/93 and a Mercedes E W212 estate 250 CGI. I know that you know them all and have had them yourself, the 220CE has 280000 km and the W212 now has 200,000 km, our family car. The W212 has never let us down, but the maintenance was much more expensive, these downsized turbo direct injection engines never have the life expectancy of a naturally aspirated engine from the 90s. The 30-year-old 220CE needs an average of 8 to 9 liters of petrol, which is 1.5 liters less than the downsized W212, ok, it has 60 hp more. But I believe that there was a zenith in quality and reliability at Mercedes that will never be reached again, and that was the W124.
Heinz, I agree the older Mercedes were in general rock solid cars but post the 124 cars and the ill fated tie up with Chrysler which reduced the reliability of the resultant cars, the quality of engineering suffered and hence that solid build quality they are renown for. They are still playing catch up today.
I had a 93 220ce from new, did 36000 miles in 9 months in it and it never missed a beat. I traded it in for a new 94 E320 cabriolet sportline, not cheap cost me nearly £50k a lot of money in '93 by time put the radio kit in. I spec'd it with traction control. Big mistake, the car would go into limp mode in heavy rain usually from motorway speeds, they were never able to fix the issue as the fault memory was lost when you switched the engine off. So I traded it after 2 frustrating years and 96000 miles in. Found out much later that they eventually sorted the problem out it was the ABS sensor. My SL420 had to have the V8 heads rebuilt under warranty at just 20k miles and the one exhaust header replaced as renown for cracking and failing on RHD cars and mine did. I have though of getting a to E320 cabriolet again, but they suffer from wiring harness degradation, blown head gaskets, terrible rust problems with chassis and wings,
The UK Mercedes of that era were very expensive, sparsely equipped, eg a radio, speakers and aerial was another £1000 although they had speaker grills in the cars with nothing behind them. A modern Mercedes of a similar spec today to my E320 would only cost about £70/80k with everything more or less standard , so in relative terms the prices have fallen as volume has increased.
Good cars compared to the British cars of that time, but not perfect, my favourite was my 96 E220 sportline cabriolet only 26000 miles like new when it was stolen from the storage facility,
