Hi all. I'm new to this forum and am wishing I had known about it when I had my 83 300D. Just sold the Benz this last summer I really loved that car! I purchased my 300D in 1993 with 161,000 miles. It was a Tennesee car and I brought it back to Wisconsin. It started great on cold days until temps dropped below minus 5 degrees. Below that, I needed to have the block heater plugged in and then it started great. I drove cross county to California once, Florida twice, Denver twice, and Ohio once. One Denver trip was to snow ski and it handled the mountains very well (just had to keep the RPMs up so the turbo was spinning. ) I even took the car up Pikes Peak!

Wisconsin winters are cold and icy. I drove the car with both all-season and snow tires and both worked well (though the snow tires improved accel, braking, and cornering.) I was surprised at the predictable handling of such a heavy car in snow (when I was alone driving, it was fun to drift the car sideways through snowy curves!)

After owning my 300D for awhile, my father felt compelled to buy a 83 300SD for his garage. Same engine, but very different car! (That's where this forum would have come in handy.) My 300D would accelerate like a DOG from a complete stop! Absolutely no initial pick-up (but after 2,000 RPMs it would zoom....and even chirp the tires in the upshift.) I was surprised at how much MORE initial pick-up my dad's 300SD had. I wonder now if my car needed something adjusted or if that was just the way it was suposed to be. The other difference is how the 300SD started at low temps. A very hard car to start at anything below 30 degrees!

Anyway, after 9 years of ownership and 100,000 miles of my own, I figured the Benz was getting 'long in the tooth' so I located a 190D in Texas as a replacement. My wife and I arrived in Dallas to find the car was NOT AT ALL as represented I asked the lady selling the car for my deposit check back and gave her $50 to re-list her car in the local shopper. Now I needed to find a car to drive back to Wisconsin!!! Crap! No suitable diesel Benz's could be found, so I settled on a 87 BMW 325. A fun car but I still long for another diesel Mercedes. I'm thinking 300SDL (I don't like the size of the 325 which means the 190D would have been a mistake also.)

So, looking forward to buying another diesel when I can and using this forum to compliment its ownership.

PS Merry Christmas!