Would you buy a 190D Euro - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

JackG · #1 04-27-2010, 07:52 AM

With a 2.0 liter?

158K with 5 spd.

Why or why not. What problems can I look forward to.

I have a line on a nice rust free,1 owner.

MTUpower · #2 04-27-2010, 08:07 AM

Why not? Feed the disease...

daw_two · #3 04-27-2010, 08:11 AM

but I'm past trying to drive a 5speed as a daily driver --- BAD left knee.

#4 04-27-2010, 10:11 AM

That car will have a very light clutch pedal. The knee would have to be REALLY bad.

The answer to the original question though. You must like the car or you wouldn't be asking the question. That said, you then have to evaluate the car based on the top three used car criteria. These criteria are:

conditon
Condition
CONDITION!

JackG · #5 04-27-2010, 10:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LarryBible

That car will have a very light clutch pedal. The knee would have to be REALLY bad.

The answer to the original question though. You must like the car or you wouldn't be asking the question. That said, you then have to evaluate the car based on the top three used car criteria. These criteria are:

conditon
Condition
CONDITION!

it's sweet or I wouldn't be asking...............

$3500.

It is also being "flipped" by the person I bought my first MB
from. He has always been straight forward and honest with
me.........I'm comfortable buying it from him.

Shawn T. W. · #6 04-27-2010, 11:05 AM

I wouldn't cuz . . . there too tiny!

But . . .if you can fit into it . . . sounds like it should be good . . . I like three pedals!

DieselPaul · #7 04-27-2010, 11:11 AM

It's not gold is it?

390pi · #8 04-27-2010, 11:55 AM

My first MBZ was a '84 190D euro-5spd.

It was federalized, and had an EGR tube added as a part of that work; I took it off and capped it at the exhaust connection.

Crank windows and manual sunroof. Manual steering. Cloth seats.

Originally no A/C but previous owner added it.

Great car; 35mpg. I put 100k miles on it with routine maint only.

I did put a clutch in at 179k before I sold it.

JackG · #9 04-28-2010, 07:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DieselPaul

It's not gold is it?

Kinda sorta...........champane(sp)

Jim B. · #10 04-28-2010, 10:48 AM

Buy the book "My Mercedes is (NOT) for sale" From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou...An Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara) (9780767928694): by Jeroen Van Bergeijk

from Amazon, ebay etc.

pic's:

http://www.mijnmercedes.nl/fotoos_en.php

It's an amazing story, and well written too, about a Dutchman who purchases a 1988 190D 2.2 euro in Holland for cheap (it failed inspction) and drives it through Spain and into West Africa, where everyone tries to buy it from him.

He says that one conclusion he made was that in African countries - the poorer the country was, the more W201 190D diesel taxicabs the country had.

They are treasured like gold. ALl the west european (Germany, Benelux) inspection failures wind up in Africa ..

excerpt:

~~~~~~~

THE PURCHASE
Year: 2004
Mileage: 136,400
Price: $1,200
Owner: Jeroen van Bergeijk

There are ads like this on the Dutch Internet auction site marktplaats.nl all the time: For sale: 1988 Mercedes 190 D Price: $1,400 136,400 miles. Alarm. Black 4-door. Excellent condition. Recent checkup, oil change, safety and emissions inspection. This one gets my attention because everything about it seems right: the kind of Mercedes I’m looking for, a reasonable asking price, not too many miles, and a recent inspection. “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” the owner says when I call his cell phone number on a Saturday morning. “You can have a look, but the first good offer gets it.” I drive immediately to one of the new suburbs just outside The Hague. The owner’s name is Ronald. He works for the police. And so, the implication is, can be trusted. Ronald is a well-built man with close-cropped hair, about what you’d expect for a police officer.Taciturn, a bit stern, but not unfriendly. We stroll to his Mercedes, which seems rather out of place among the brand-new gleaming mid-class cars parked on Ronald’s tidy little street. The finish is dull. There’s a crack in the bumper. The sunroof doesn’t open anymore. The driver’s seat sags, and the doors don’t lock.

I couldn’t get that cab in Ouagadougou out of my mind. On the plane home to Amsterdam, I’d obsessed about how that car had wound up there. I imagined a Dutch aid worker who’d gotten the Mercedes from his uncle and imported it through the port in neighboring Benin. Maybe an African immigrant to the Netherlands had bought the car and sent it to his family in Burkina Faso. Or some adventurous Dutchman had driven that Mercedes 190 straight through the Sahara to Ouagadougou to sell it there to the highest bidder. But what really happened? How did a Dutch car end up in Africa?

Take Ronald’s Mercedes. A seventeen-year-old car is, in fact, living on borrowed time: the average life expectancy of an automobile in Western Europe is only fifteen years. For a car like Ronald’s there are really only two scenarios. Most likely it’ll end up on the scrap heap. Not because a seventeen-year-old car is in such bad condition but because the cost of the repairs it will soon undoubtedly need will greatly exceed the car’s value. In Western European countries like the Netherlands, Ronald’s car has lost its usefulness. But in countries where the cost of repairs is much lower, the same car is still worth something. Hence the other scenario for Ronald’s Mercedes: export. Of the more than seven million cars driving around on Dutch roads in 2005, more than a quarter million had been exported by the end of the year. All the wealthy Western European countries export their old automobiles, millions in total. Nowadays most go to Eastern Europe, but a considerable minority, an estimated 500,000 per year, wind up in Africa. That Dutch Mercedes in Ouagadougou is not alone. The Opel Astra of a traveling salesman from Hamburg spends its days as a bush taxi in Ghana. The Toyota Corolla of a Parisian housewife is now the property of a camel trader in Mauritania. Most of the old automobiles that leave Europe for Africa are shipped by boat, but a small number are driven there. In fact, since the 1970s, driving a used car to West Africa has become a popular pastime among French, Belgian, German, and Dutch adventurers. These people are like the godwits, terns, and swallows that summer in Europe. Every winter they flock to West Africa, selling their castoffs at a tidy profit in countries like Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. To get there, they have to bribe customs officials, befriend corrupt cops, and—above all—drive straight through the Sahara.

I go for a test drive in Ronald’s Mercedes. It appears to have few mechanical problems: the engine runs well, the brakes are in order, and though the acceleration is a little sluggish, it shifts easily. It looks a bit shabby here in this brand-new suburb, but for a seventeen- year-old car it’s in excellent shape. Ouagadougou’s cabbies will envy me. I even get Ronald to knock two hundred dollars off the price, and a little later it’s mine, that African-taxi-to-be.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~