In the mid eighties when my first 240D started getting ragged I was looking for another. I saw a late model for sale in a driveway and stopped to look at it.

I knocked on the door and a friendly middle aged woman gave me the key and said she would be out in a few minutes. The first thing I did was open the hood and immediately saw SERIOUS crumple damage at the bottom of the right wheel well. She came out and I asked her how bad the accident was. She choked back some tears and said that her teenage son and a friend had a serious accident and that the car saved her sons life, but that the friend was not so lucky.

The car was almost new so it was worth a lot of money and had been totaled, but they had the car fixed, I assume by a low dollar body shop. The body work on the outside looked reasonably good, but they didn't do much do disguise the pulling of the crumple zone. I, of course, was not going to buy the car and did not ask any further details for fear of upsetting the woman further.

When you consider the cars of the time, I belive these cars are extremely safe. That said, you just never know about injuries in an accident. Over the years I've seen cars that just looked like no one could have survived only to find that they walked or stumbled away. Then there others with seemingly minor damage in which there was a fatality.

If you look at the safety technology that was in the 123's though, safety was definitely an important design criteria. MB started two generations earlier with crumple zones, telescoping columns, seatbacks designed to break a certain way, head restraints, comfortable shoulder harnesses. And also often overlooked by many are accident avoidance items such as four wheel disc brakes, decent and predictable handling, etc.

My daughter was such an aggressive driver, even at an early age(she started driving when she was eight because we live in the country,) I told her that I would not turn her loose in a car until I could get one with front, rear, side, top and bottom airbags. Short of a car equipped this way, for a car of its time, there would be very few cars any safer.

Have a great day,