How underpowered must a vehicle be to be considered intolerable to drive? The only new car Americans can buy with two-digit horsepower right now is the 78-horse Mitsubishi Mirage, widely considered to be miserably slow, but today's 62-horsepower Junkyard Gem was much, much more sluggish than that car. It was also one of the most reliable motor vehicles ever built, period, and its long career ended during the winter in a snowy Colorado car graveyard.
No other major car manufacturer could match Mercedes-Benz in build quality during the middle 1970s, except perhaps Toyota with its Century (which was handbuilt in tiny quantities with Emperor Hirohito as its target customer).
That gave this 3,205-pound car a power-to-weight ratio of 51.7 pounds per horsepower, which makes the 2024 Mirage with its 28 pounds per horse accelerate like a Saturn V rocket by comparison. Back in 1982, I took my driver-training instruction in a 48-horsepower 1979 Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel, which I considered terrifyingly slow even by Late Malaise Era standards, and it boasted a mighty 40.7 pounds per horsepower (yes, diesel torque helps, but nowhere near enough). In 1982 and 1983, the power-to-weight nadir of U.S.-market vehicles during the modern era appears to have been achieved by the Volkswagen Vanagon Diesel, each horsepower of which had to drag an awe-inspiring 67.3 pounds.
Yes, it was extremely slow. So what? These cars rode nicely and rarely suffered from mechanical woes.
Unfortunately, Mercedes-Benz hadn't gotten around to installing six-digit odometers in the W114 by 1975, which means we can't know what its final mileage total was. I've found discarded diesel Mercedes-Benzes with well over a half-million miles showing, and this car might well have driven just as far during its life.
With so many of these cars still on the road, we can expect to find them in junkyards for decades to come.
You got what you paid for with the W114.
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