George, I saw a link to your personal site over at ITRCA. That is a very sweet 69 Mercedes 300 SEL 6.3. How long have you had the car?

I know this is way OT, but George is a member here and I wanted to give him props for his other car...

check it out:
http://www.george.knighton.com

 

Hmm. The personal Web site didn't last long.

Flux is asking about my M100. That was a tough one. Huge amounts of money went into it. People brag that Mercedes says that they'll never stop having parts for these cars...but they never said the parts would be cheap.



Looked like this. Took forever to sort the air suspension.

This was before electronics, so there was a complicated system of switches and valves that kept the car balanced. The problem is that without electronics there was always a ½ s delay between the time you turned the wheel at speed, and the time the car decided what kind of set it wanted to take.

So counter steering was a way of life and you just had to get used to it.

A U curve was fine, but a carousel would be difficult because the ½ s delay per steering wheel turn would add up. Your best course of action was to just slow down.

Mechanical injection system most people didn't want to tackle, but I had a guy.

Four speed automatic...without a torque converter. You knew when the car shifted.

Maybe I should've kept it, but it was more of a reliving the past kind of thing, and modern cars began to be better in almost every way.

Except maybe the smell. The car smelled great on the inside. Wood and leather, I guess.

 

It’s the horsehair and the leather.

Mercedes has always had that unique interior smell.

I can smell my Grammie’s 300TD right now…

 

Simpler times.

This was probably the cheapest way to get into a 108 chassis at the time.

1969 280S, SOHC straight six, four speed manual, carburettors.

Incredibly reliable and long lasting.

This is a picture taken just yesterday and the car's still wonderful after 56 years and hundreds of thousands of miles.

A leather car would've worn out but MBTex lasts forever with normal care.

 

I'd never, ever consider any of these cars in 2025.

Everything is way too expensive. They're charming, but you'd need a huge cash reserve.

EV is the future, for good or evil.

 

I sure hope you are wrong... because that would truly be a shame.

 

I think it's unavoidable.

The current US administration has slowed the change in the United States but it's proceeding elsewhere.

EV sales in Europe are up 37%, year over year, even though Tesla sales are drastically reduced.

Where the American industry has gone wrong is to ignore the low end. Chevy stopped making the LG Bolt EV right when the idea was taking off. They needed the factory capacity for a bigger car.

Our companies are giving us huge, honkin' trucks and SUV, and expensive luxury cars.

We need little things like the BYD Dolphin, and these are the cars that we'd buy.