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Four months into this series, we have seen three discarded vehicles built in (West) Germany: a 1974 Ford Capri, a 1981 Volkswagen Vanagon, and a 1984 BMW 325e. Conspicuously missing from that lineup is a vehicle made by the manufacturer that built the very first car 136 years ago, so today we’ll take a look at an example of the most legendary of all the Mercedes-Benz S-Classes, a 380 SE recently found in a Denver self-service yard.
This car is a W126, which fits in the S-Class pantheon between the W116 and the W140 and was sold in the United States for the 1980 through 1991 model years. In my opinion, the W126 was the best-built Mercedes-Benz of all time and probably one of the best-built motor vehicles of all time, period (the Toyota Century beats the W126 in that department).
Most W126 models were quite a bit more expensive (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than the current S-Classes. This one had an MSRP of $43,030, or about $131,043 in 2024 dollars. If you wanted the king of the W126s in 1984 (the 500 SEC coupe), the list price was $57,100, or $173,892 in today’s money.
Because those prices were so steep and the Deutschmark was so weak against the dollar during the early-to-middle 1980s, tens of thousands of American car shoppers bought W126s in West Germany and imported them via the gray market, saving plenty of money but enraging American Mercedes-Benz dealers (who eventually succeeded in lobbying that loophole closed). This car was imported via legitimate dealership channels, but I’ve found quite a few gray-market Mercedes-Benzes of this era during my junkyard travels, including a 1980 280, a 1980 500 SE, a 1981 380 SEL, and a 1983 500 SEC.
Because these cars held together so well, they still show up regularly in car graveyards around the country. This 380 SE has low miles for a thrown-out W126, but I’ve found a couple of these cars showing better than a half-million miles on their odometers.
This one looks to have had a solid body and nice interior when it arrived here, but even a W126 is going to have the occasional mechanical problem and repairs tend to be costly.
This car had a stack of parking tickets from Longmont, Colorado, under its wipers, though, so it may have been a good runner that got towed away and auctioned off due to unpaid fines.
This being a 380, its engine is a 3.8-liter gasoline-fueled SOHC V-8 rated at 155 horsepower and 196 pound-feet of torque. For 1984, American Mercedes-Benz W126 shoppers could also get a 300 SD powered by a straight-five turbodiesel with 123 horses and 184 lb-ft of torque or a 500 SEL/SEC boasting 184 hp with 247 lb-ft.
Because 1984 S-Classes weighed between 3685 to 3870 pounds—featherweight stuff by the standards of 2024—even the oil-burners were tolerably quick (the current C-Class is hundreds of pounds heavier than this 380 SE, while the ’24 S-Class outweighs it by more than a half-ton).
In Europe, the 1979–84 S-Classes with non-V-8 engines could be purchased with manual transmissions, but all U.S-market W126s came with mandatory four-speed automatics.
This 380 SE will be crushed, but we can hope that many of its parts will live on in other W126s.
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