"We all adore its long, quirky, European body and cool square edges—see one parked on the street, and someone in your group will squeal, “Oh! Ilovethose old wagons!” But I’m not talking about a car that will endure for an eternity inhearts and minds.
I mean it literally. This thing will. Not. Die.
“You cannot kill them,” Phil Skinner, Kelley Blue Book’s collector car market editor, said recently. “They just keep on running. It’s Mercedes technology—and on a station wagon! It’s the perfect combination.”
Jonathan Klinger, a spokesman for car insurerHagerty, said almost the exact same thing.
“If you say ‘overbuilt, overengineered, bulletproof,’ this is the era and the series that comes to mind,” he said. “This is literally the car you cannot kill.”
When they came out in April1978, they were the most expensive station wagons on the market;Mercedes sold them at a little more than26,000 deutsche marks a pop (roughly $15,000).These were the cars that started Americans on the road to their currentluxury SUV obsession—the first modern vehicles that were bothpractical and relatively luxurious. Up until then, it was one or the other.
“At the time, if you wanted to go to the Hamptons with the kids and the dog, you really didn’t have a lot of options,” said Mike Kunz, manager of the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center in Irvine, Calif. “You could have bought a Jeep, but that was in no way a luxury vehicle. It was crude, really.”
The W123 line helped introduce new technology such asantilock brakes(optional from August 1980), a retractable steering column, and the driver air bag (optional from 1982). (Someof those technologies, like ABS, were introduced either later or not at allforU.S.-bound cars at the time.) Many had wood interior trim with a passenger side exterior mirror, power windows, central locking, and rear-facing extra seats. How novel! Mercedes sold a five-speedmanual transmissioninEurope and a four-speedautomatic transmission in the U.S. (The naturally aspirated 300TD wagon had onlya brief career in North America, asa turbocharged model replaced it in 1981.)
Bottom line? They appealed to people who needed a workhorse they could use and abuse."
Mercedes sold the wagon from 1978 until the mid-1980s.
Source: Mercedes-BenzWhen they came out in April1978, they were the most expensive station wagons on the EXTERIOR