Purchase - 06/09/2016

I ended up taking the plunge on a Mercedes 04 e55 AMG with 108k miles on it. 

Originally I wasn’t looking at ~100k mile cars. Normally when I’m looking at cars like this I look at sub 60k mile cars or cars over 130k miles. My experience has been that cars getting to 100k have a higher probability of owners that are just doing the bare minimum for the car until they can get rid of it and after picking it up you’ll be left with thousands to spend on scheduled maintenance and preventative maintenance. That goes double for German cars. That’s why 130k+ mile cars are generally what I was looking at because I found most cars at this mark had 2nd and 3rd owners that bought the cars and did all the maintenance normally making them solid buys.

This car had that process accelerated. I bought it from a Mercedes master tech that had bought the car from the 2nd owner 2 years ago and spent those two years replacing everything that even looked like it might cause problems down the road. All of the known issues with these cars had been addressed under his ownership and he had stacks of documentation to back it up. I found the car on craigslist and struck up a conversation with the owner. The car has spent its entire life in the mid Texas climate. It had a clear title and had never been in an accident. The owner, being a Mercedes employee, was also able to furnish the car’s detailed history with Mercedes dealerships in the form of a VMI. After spending about a week talking I made an offer that was $1k less than his asking price with the condition that he could remove and sell the electronic height adjustment kit (car has adjustable gas shock suspension) to recoup on the sale price. He accepted and I flew out to Austin, TX a week later to buy the car and drive it home to Mississippi.

The W211 e55 AMG was an amazing example of the car. In the word’s of Clarkson, “it goes like stink.” It makes me laugh every time I dig into the accelerator because it’s bizarre how fast it is. It just goes against all preconceived notions of how a sedan is supposed to be. You just don’t expect something this big and heavy to get up and go like this thing does. On the flipside, it does the same thing to your brain when you get on the brakes. It’s got 8 pot calipers in the front and 6 pot calipers in the back all tied together with a brake-by-wire system Mercedes calls Sensotronic Brake Control (SBC). It takes some getting used to as the pedal ‘feel’ isn’t anything like pushing a pedal tied to a MC and vac booster. But the results aren’t anything you can argue with. Stomp the pedal and your eyeballs will promptly hit the windshield. Again, it’s bizarre to think something this big can stop this quick.

What really caught my eye about the car is how loaded it was. I think I’ve come across maybe 1 or 2 examples in my price range during the 3 years I’ve been casually looking at these cars that were optioned this well. Here’s the car’s original sticker

Distronic, in particular, was the option I really wanted to find. I’m not going to say it’s impossibly rare, but I’ve been looking at E55’s for several years now and I haven’t seen many with this option that were in my price range. It was very well optioned and the original sticker price reflects how much the original buyer went all out.

Finally, the icing on the cake is that this car already has a Euro-charged SC pulley, belt wrap kit, and ECU + TCU tune! The pulley and tunes are primarily about adding HP of course, but I also see it with the belt wrap as a preventative measure since the original OEM pulley doesn’t have such a great track record and the wrap kit cuts down on slips and wear. It was a big bonus for me.

Here's the original listing + pictures from the the sale of the car that the owner acquired the car from. Maybe not a 1:1 comparison, but close. The interior / exterior definitely was a little dirtier when I got the car, but the powertrain was in much better shape.