help 300sl question!

[sean 300D]

Hey SL guys! I'm visiting here from the diesel forum. I'm looking at a 92 300SL with 41k on it. It's a manual trans. One owner etc. My question is: does the manual trans. hurt the resale of the car? Or are they slower to sell etc. Is there anything I should look for on this car that could be overtly wrong?? It's at a dealership, and they're waiting for me to call them back. They're asking $18900 for it. I ran it on kbb and it only books out wholesale at about $11k. Sooooo??? I don't know? The 18k they're asking for it seems to be in line with the national avg. but, are people actually getting that out of these cars. Would I be better off to keep looking and get a 500sl instead?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

thanks in advance
sean

[deanyel]

Price sounds high to me only because the market is sooooo bad on everything. But that's a very low miles cars with a rare stick so they may get close to there. But have you driven it? Make sure you like it - it's not a very elegant setup - heavy clutch, long/dogleg throw, and geared very short, i.e. 60 mph is 3,000 rpm. I owned one once, but came to think of it as one of the great all-time disappointments from MB.

[sean 300D]

Thanks for the reply! We're still negotiating...the GM dealer called me back, and armed with a little "knowledge" I've got them down quite a bit...so we'll see. I may be joining the SL forum! Now, I don't expect this car to be anywhere at all as reliable as my turbo-diesel....lol.

sean

[elau]

It depends how much you like stick. Manual on a SL is extremely rare. Do a search on the forum on what to look for, especially the soft top mechanism. Other than that, the car is pretty solidly built. One suggestion is that you should look into buying extended warranty as fixing things on this car can be pricely.