I'm sadier than that. Ride Ducati, mostly drive vans (albeit a Sportline) or 3.5t lwb hi-top or WV R32...now that's a boy racer car. The merc is for sensible busy household stuff...not really meant to fun.
The R32 is a lovely car is it blue? Just don't get old before your time You will be choosing comfort over toys
I already do , but for medial reasons. MTS1200 Pikes Peak over a 998s...stupid arm with metal bones. I only got the R32 as I was told I'd never ride again. ALL my cars and vans are Silver. ALL my bikes are Red. As it should be.
I don't care for cars at all,as long as they get me where I need to be....the Merc fits the bill perfectly I have my Vivaro Sportive Combi for throwing truck wheels/crippled bikes/anything in I have a Jeep Cherokee for dragging trucks out of the yard when it snows For pleasure,I ride my bikes
the engines themselves are pretty bullet proof. The V6’s are good, but unless you get to do lovely long runs in them you’ll never see their best. Short runs in the bigger engines used to contribute to moisture collecting in the fuel inlet systems, which in turn was difficult to diagnose and isolate. What this meant for the owner was potentially injector / lambda faults. Also MAF sensors don’t come up on the STAR system diagnostic and are also another contributor of poor running. Bottom line is that they, like all large engines don’t like pootling around. Lambda sensors set you back 220 quid at a main stealer, and be aware that merc sell injectors as a bank. Since the MAF doesn’t come up on diagnostic, be prepared to have a big bag of salt with you to sprinkle on them when they try and tell you the lambda sensor you replaced a year ago is shot again! (been there, done that). Gearboxes are another issue. 5 speed should be fine, I think six speed also (up to around ’06 -07) then they went to 7 speed. The issue is not the box, but the gearbox speed sensor which is a bit cheap and nasty. On the early boxes it was a separate lead – so to change it was merc’s 80 quid theft and some swearing under the car. The 7 speed boxes changed all that. The sensor lead went onto the sensor plate – where all the other gearbox sensors were... which is mounted onto the gearbox ECU. So repair goes from 80 DIY to 1300 pounds ECU – oh and you need a STAR system to upload the old ECU eprom and then download and do an adaption on the new ECU. If the car has been main dealer serviced and has got a full service history however, if you make enough of a noise they should replace it under goodwill as it’s a globally know fault. I basically compiled a court pack of evidence when I had a speedo sensor go on her highness’ CLK280, and they wanted me to pay for a new gearbox ECU. Eventually after a lot of arguing they caved in and did it for free. They drive a lot better than the C class, and a lot more thought has gone into their construction and build that the C. They’re a big old boat though, so you’re right to look at upwards of 220, which is an absolute minimum on these. All being well in urban pottering you should never see less that about 35mpg once its warmed up.
With the 211's it's a case of working out which faults you'd prefer to deal with. I ran a 54-plate 320cdi wagon for a fair while without serious incident. Pre-facelift ones often have rust issues, and the first couple of years can suffer from electrical maladies because the main loom was put in robotically. Once they changed to doing this manually the problems stopped, probably because more care was being taken over routing and not over-stressing the loom. The way to identify is from the grille panel above the centre vents - if it's slatted it's an early car, the manually fitted cars have a lattice mesh. The straight six and 5sp box are bombproof, very little to go wrong there. Watch out for SBC issues too - they have a finite service life and higher mileage units may have already been reset once. If the unit needs replacing you're looking circa £1k last time I checked. Facelift cars have the V6, which is still solid but not as bombproof as the straight six and the 7G gearbox (as already alluded to) isn't as cheap to maintain. They are more economical though. Rust is pretty rare on these by comparison. On the estates the load cover sometimes stops lifting automatically when you open the boot, you have to drop the roof lining and replace the motor which isn't cheap. Crap roads will give the ball joints a good kicking and the springs are known for cracking (although mine were still fine at 140k).
