Occasional Observations

Until tonight, my last ride in a Mercedes-Benz 500E was waaaay back when I was too young to appreciate it. It was when I was a news reporter on the UK's Autocar magazine (oh, the irony), and one came in on test in late 1990, when they first hit the streets. The finer details escape me but it was a very short-term test, a couple of days or so ...

Apart from the car being black, expensive as hell, and virtually hand-built by a famous German car company that wasn't actually called M-B, I thought of the 500E as the bastard big brother of our long-term 300E-24. I'd hardly gotten over the "hey, I'm 23 years old and driving this MERC!!!!!!" (me) about the -24, aka "Hnnnh, see you've borrowed your daddy's car you little ***t!" (everyone else) when this honking 5-litre monster arrives on the block.

I didn't appreciate it then ... the LHD thing was so inconsiderate.

Some 15-plus years later, back in an immaculate 500E that still feels tight despite the years, I'm starting to realize what I missed when I was pimping that test car along the Chelsea Embankment all those years ago. In short: I should have been headed out of London - headed for the Welsh mountains.

Labels: oldtimer, petrolhead