You can make money on these cars if you are selective when you buy them and if you do your own work. I bought a 63 300SE coupe (which looked similar to this
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1969-MERCEDES-280SE-SUNROOF-COUPE-RESTORED-GORGEOUS_W0QQitemZ4599215414QQcategoryZ6329QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem ) in Germany in 1970 for $2500 and drove it a couple of years and 30,000 miles before selling it for $2700 in 1972. I bought it from the dealer in Karlsruhe and it was in excellent shape. It had been an executive "perk" car for a paper company in Hamburg that was traded in as soon as it had been depreciated out. It had new tires and a new power train installed by Mercedes around 50K km prior to my acquisition so if you go on purchase and sale price I made money. If you add in oil changes, gas and general maintenance I lost money but I did get to drive the car 2 years and around 30K miles without any depreciation. If i had bought a new Mustang for $2,500 in 1970 and driven it 2 years and 30,000 miles I would have been lucky to get $1,000 in a trade for it in 1972. Of course if there had been any major repairs all bets would have been off but that is where being selective comes in.
Basket cases can be pretty good if you buy the right car and are good at estimating everything you will have to do to a car to get it into perfect condition. When I sold the 300SE coupe I picked up a 66 Jaguar E-Type with a perfect body and a dismantled motor for $800. I went into this as a business deal with a friend who was a mechanical genius who knew Jags. The car cost around $6,000 and first owner was a rich kid who drove it till the clutch wore out around 65,000 miles before trading it in. The dealer sent it to an incompetent mechanic for a clutch job (which takes about 20 hours on that car because you have to pull the motor out to do it) The mechanic was either too dumb or too cheap to replace the throw out bearing (which is graphite and wears down along with the clutch disc and must be replaced) so he welded a piece of a bolt on the rod between the slave cylinder and the fork so that the clutch would disengage. He welded too much on and ended up with a clutch that rode all the time. The second owner bought the car from the dealer for $3,500 and drove it a few months before the the thrust washer spun and the engine blew up. When that happened the second owner towed the car home and tried to fix it himself. So when we picked it up it consisted of a bare body, block and head with parts in 23 warehouse boxes which we threw into a horse trailer and brought home. Three months and $400 later we had a car that we could have sold for around $3,200 with a $2,000 profit but I decided to keep the car because I was 22 at the time and it ran like a scalded rat. If you are unfamiliar with the car here is what one looks like
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/David-Ferguson-restored-E-Type-now-available-for-sale_W0QQitemZ4598773067QQcategoryZ6277QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem It was a poor man's Ferrari. So my wife and I tooted around in that car for 15 years before I spent about $6,000 and did a complete restoration on it. About that time the stock market crashed and crazy people started buying collectible stuff. One day I was driving it around and a guy offered me $30,000 for it...and that's when I paid off my house and bought my 230SL. If you add up all of the money I spent on gas, oil, tires, etc. and insurance and property tax, I probably made a little money on it but not as much proportionately as I would made if I had flipped it after four months. Of course if I had bought a Corvette in 1972 my trade in in 1988 would have been a lot less than $30,000.
I have a friend who scours the countryside for perfect Mercedes cars to buy, fix up, drive for a few months and sell. There are a lot of them out there...cars whose original owners are very wealthy who serviced them at the dealer and kept them in garages. He buys them, keeps them in his 8 car garage, has them detailed and sells them after a while as museum pieces to discriminating buyers. He does it as a hobby because he loves the chase and the process of bringing them up to showroom condition and he loves driving a different classic Mercedes car every 6 months. I am quite sure that he makes good money on every car he touches.
The big thing about Mercedes cars is that if you are mechanical and selective you can drive a beautiful car for a whole lot less than the average person spends for his "ride". Think about it...Right now as I write this there is a guy sitting in a car showroom signing the papers to buy a $45,000 SUV that is going to be worth only $15,000 in 3 years. If he invested that $30,000 in something that that is not going to go Poof in the next 3 years he would really have something!
I just bought an 86 300SDL for $1,500 which is going to be a museum piece in a few months when I finish with it. Everything is close to perfect about it except that it has a cracked head and the transmission leaks a little. I am estimating that my total cost for the car when completed will be less than $6,000 including a new "22" head, new transmission seals and about 40 hours of my time. If you think about it, $6,000 is a lot less than the first months depreciation on that SUV and somewhere around 5 years from now the SDL will run better and be worth more. Of course it is hard to avoid depreciation on any new car. Looking through the records for the SDL I can see that the car was sold new in September 1986 (probably for over $48,000 tax and all) and sold to the second owner by a dealer in September 1988 for $29,000. So that is around $20,000 in depreciation when you figure that the original owner probably traded it in for a couple thousand less than $29,000 the second owner paid for it.
So the message is to know as much as you can about these cars so that you can get into the right one at the right time in its depreciation cycle. Thats where this excellent web site comes into the picture!