Hello,

I have a quick question regarding whether or not to purchase a car, and I'm hoping to get some sound advice...

I went to look at an '81 240D tonight. The car is in pretty good shape and the engine started right up, sounds pretty good. The only problem is the automatic transmission does nothing. You move the shifter and there is no indication that the transmission is doing anything. I did look under the car, but of course, I didn't jack it up and inspect the transmission, nor would I know exactly which items would be suspect. My question is this: what might be the worst case expenditure? The owner offered to sell me the car for $250... Like I said, everything else looked good, the a/c even works... it's been converted to R134 and blows really cold. The owner had messed with the vacuum system some previously and had removed the unit which sits atop the valve cover and bypassed it because he said the previous one wasn't working (he had a used unit in the trunk which he had yet to install). The door locks operated fine and the air blew through the center dash vents, which is the only indication I know of for vacuum system leaks. I do understand that the shift timing is controlled by vacuum, but I'm not sure if that would play into the current problem.

$250 sounds ridiculously cheap, and I'm not afraid to tinker and work on the car, but for the transmission, I would have this car towed straight to a shop. I just don't know how much money I could end up spending if I had to rebuild or replace the transmission.

He said it was working up until about 6 months ago and just stopped. He's not bothered to fix it, and he's got several other vehicles and motorcycles about. He said he's just not interested in this car and wants it gone...

Could anyone please tell me what I might reasonably suspect to be the problem? I could budget up to about $1500 to repair the transmission and still feel like I got a good deal on the car. If the situation sounds fishy, then please let me know what you think. Not being able to drive the car, there might be other problems, but everything I could see where it sat looked great.
Thanks.