1971 Mercedes Benz 300SEL 6.3 - In Mein Merry Muscle Car

Long trips in big cars that get terrible gas mileage-like the 6.3-take us vividly back to that time, the 1970s, while somehow reminding us of yesterday, when cars got appalling mileage, too. They fairly cry out for sound tracks of indefatigable pretension.OK, I give up, I confess.

That was me listening to Jethro Tull, the '70s band that hipsters love to hate, while blasting through Ohio on I-80 one disgustingly humid evening this past August. Having left New York that same afternoon in a big old 1971 Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3 headed for Empire, Michigan (population 378), I was undertaking what you might call a multipronged, long-distance salute to the past. And tune-wise, I thought, hipsters be damned. If you can't let it all hang out in your own private automobile, you might as well be on the bus. Why not a musical interlude with the flute-wielding egoist Ian Anderson and his merry olde band of rock conjurers? Why not march back to the time of Tull?


Photo Gallery: 1971 Mercedes Benz 300SEL 6.3 - Classic Cars - Automobile Magazine


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Automobile Magazine
12-23-2008 05:12 AM