Here's Why You Should NEVER EVER Buy a Cheap Used Mercedes

welcome to who V's garage and this is my 1992 Mercedes 500 e for those that missed my first video on this car I bought the cheapest Mercedes 500 e for only $10,000 it was local here to Wichita Kansas and $10,000 is a really good deal for one of these for those who don't know the 500 E is a really rare Mercedes Porsche partnership a lot of engineering from Porsche went into this Mercedes to figure out how to stuff a v8 engine into this car along with the suspension tuning and several other things and then assembly the bulk of it took place at Porsche as well the car was trucked back and forth several times to finally be completed these are extremely rare vehicles that have gone way up in value recently but it wasn't that long ago that the 500 e was just a normal used car and the longtime owners of this 500 e treated it like a normal old car now it has just a little over a hundred thousand miles and this Mercedes which many people think is bulletproof a bank vault of build quality and totally invincible this car is totally falling apart and that's because Mercedes reliability is a total myth now I'm not saying this car is junk in Mercedes in general aren't good cars they are very sturdy well-built cars but they're just as susceptible to age and abuse as any other vehicle they're no better than a Toyota or a Honda in a lot of ways but the main reason why you see so many old Mercedes going down the road is because people value them so much either the owners have had them for a long time and paid a lot of money for these vehicles so they feel justified spending a lot of money maintaining them and keeping on the road longer and longer or it's just the perception of Mercedes I'm having Mercedes I'm gonna spend three five thousand dollars a year keeping my mercedes running just because I'm in a Mercedes people are gonna do that with a Honda or a Toyota they're just gonna junk it and get a new one when a big repair pops up so you've heard the old adage of the Mercedes is good for a million miles it can last generations and there are tons of cars out there with tons of miles millions of miles but that's only because the owners are willing to keep these cars on the road forever and it's not just the badge it does help that these cars drive really well even as they age this 1992 Mercedes feels just as comfortable if not more comfortable a lot of ways than a modern car it also has all the luxury conveniences that you would want in a modern car for the most part and you can upgrade the radio to have Bluetooth and all that stuff so a lot of people can justify keeping one of these cars going as for me normally I'm super gung-ho to dive in deep to a lost cause project but I have completely buried my mechanics of car wizard into tons of lost causes my Maserati Quattroporte after swapping in the mechatronics The Fault code for the transmission still exists we have to dig deeper into that my Porsche 911 Turbo is in a thousand pieces my Toyota previa the engine is out and in a thousand pieces as well and then there are the cars at home that have less urgent needs but still have needs along with that I've bought two more projects that I haven't even shown on this channel yet so I have completely buried myself and as much as I love this 500e I'm not sure if it's worth diving into especially since I paid such a cheap price for it I know I could probably do a few little things and at least get out of it if not make a little bit of money why don't I let the car wizard give his honest assessment of my 500e we're going to go through it head to toe and find out everything that's wrong with it I know just from driving it that the engine misfires like crazy the transmission is really slow to engage and shifts weird and the rear end is making a weird noise which I'm hoping is because of these old weird tires I bought the original 16 hole wheels that were on this car when it was newer and swapped those on and fingers crossed I don't have a trifecta of powertrain failures and in addition to that the safety restraint and system light is on the airbag light and there are other little problems so it's it's a long list and I'm sure the car wizard will find even more if I can pry him away from my Lamborghini wizard what do you think of my 500 E you're gonna do an inspection on this thing yes oh okay I have to get pulled off the looking at that yes he has the 500 e deserves a little bit of your love and I'm gonna decide if I'm going to dive into another project or okay sell it on to somebody else because I I know how to turn a wrench I'm I'm like mediocre maybe below average but it's not something I'd like to do for fun and for someone that loves these old Mercedes and loves working on cars in the weekends this would be a great project but if you're paying somebody's labor like the car wizard it may not be a worthwhile investment but we'll see maybe it's not that bad put it on the lift and figure it out if I have to sell some more cheeseburgers yeah it's really misfiring badly yeah oh uh hood pad you know that's a pretty common problem so we're think about this misfire is it's not consistent it'll run like garbage one minute and then the next it's running smoothly perfectly accelerates all of its 340 horsepower so it's kind of a mystery there this is the year of Mercedes biodegradable wiring harnesses were the harnesses were designed to fall apart and degrade as the car was junked but they started biodegrading in the cars winning the cars we're still serviceable is a horrible thing so I have a little guest there but we'll see yeah I'm gonna turn it off because it's really not happy and then you see and then also a wizard you see the growing puddle of goo there yes that's another thing to look out for yep there's a lot of coolant coming out while you're doing that I'm gonna go grab these wheels to put on there this was kind of new I think it happened on the highway drive up I just seem to be pop back in place or so huh oh nice seriously oh we're gonna go through all of this you're gonna write a novel I can't imagine it being worse than the m5 I can't imagine you can't no I I don't want to starting with this coolant leak wizard there's the goo come on way up there yeah the radiator side tank the side tank so the plastic part that connects to the metal part of the radiators crimps is is leaking lovely see right here the rubber gasket on the other side sure enough well at least that's relatively straightforward to do don't forget looks a little oily under here typical old Mercedes rust proofing huh okay I'm missing a whole part right that's those rotors are really bad we got like a very deep groove Wow real bearings really well they probably just need to be greased and tightened I see what you can do during the break job yeah all right the transmission there's nothing we can really do about it as far as it delaying into reverse and what are you doing there heat shield coming apart it's not a big deal hey don't you do anything about that yeah are they add the axle boots themselves we think it's on both sides it's gear oil [Music] so my differential this big pumpkin here maybe toast as well if you're hearing a noise with the leaves well I'm kind of hoping that it's tire noise that's why I got these wheels and tires and these bushings on the body [Music] that's rear sub frame mounts supreme mounts the other rubber completely perished yeah right okay pretty good list of stuff there nothing terrifying but a lot of things lower down and take a look in the engine bay oh boy so probably have with older cars is it doesn't have a modern computer system where you could just plug it in and get a bunch of fault codes read out to you immediately the check in july inton with this car and it's still misfiring so it's going to require some investigation requires more time than the wizard is permitting for this video but i'll start it up just for a little bit so you can see anything obvious I guess for sure is gonna have to do the wiring harness but and those wires they look really shiny and new and no sign of the insulation degrading same with these pull off on injector wire and it looked okay right yeah you can pull this one up okay yeah nice wiring there may have been replaced wizard might have dodged a bullet how much nice and new yeah that one too this is definitely not the original wiring harness it's been upgraded so what would be causing my inter minute misfire then wizard can be cap rotor could be plugs could be an intake vacuum leak so you have to do this old-fashioned way pull plugs and see if it gets worse when you pull the spark plug wires off the distributor yeah interesting oh you just pulled a spark plug fire which would stop the spark from going to that cylinder and I didn't even change the way of the car ran at all it's not making any kind of sparky noise whatsoever there's no spark here is the problem right so that's not too serious probably it might look out look out on this thing well have something unexpected a bit of good news there yeah but the ignition so what do you think's gonna fix my one warning light that s our s safety restraint system I'm gonna have to go through the diagnostic pin connector here and do a test to get the codes and then once I get two codes I'll have to go through and check wiring it's not something that's probably we're gonna be able to film they could take that an hour's hours but it's a pretty simple system though as far as you're able to figure it out but it's never more than a few hundred dollars I'm usually right okay good so that leaves this noise that I'm hearing and I'm hoping it's tires so we can throw these ones that I bought on this car I'll take it for a spin see if the noise goes away and I guess while I'm doing that you can figure up your total then we can decide the 500 ease fate oh boy now I'm not one that normally poop who's on mods is especially period-correct ones but those wheels especially in the condition they were in they do this carnie favors there's more about the tires if it was gonna fix that noise and so far that noise is still there maybe not quite as bad when I'm off load but then under load does have a nice scraping noise so the tire noise was definitely part of it but there's a little more of a wine going on the back end it was a combination of noises great wizard looking at yachts what like hot were you looking at seekers you can't afford a Sun seeker wizard always something last time it was in Malibu mansions not Sun seekers real funny so what do you got I drove it and it is a lot quieter with those tires but I still hear the differential unfortunately just took away some of the noise okay the radiator 350 that's not bad not out of the ordinary the valve cover gasket job will be 325 okay the belly pan will be a hundred bucks install it's like a used ones not cheap there's every reproduction really they sell them at cheap new the front pads rotors adjust the bearings is five hundred dollars good to tune up is kind of expensive the Rovers two rotors two caps the plugs and the plug wires just seven hundred dollars yeah most of that is the plug wires wow that's like an expensive coil job on a v8 normally and usually cabin rotors are cheaper so that's okay $700 and that's my intermittent misfire so that's kind of an important one you can't really skip on it email the car paint actually ran great the moment it drove out of here quit misfiring really it's so weird might be a wiring issue let's see spark plug wires SRS wiring two hundred bucks getting sort out whatever it is they used if installed about 550 that's not bad I guess compatible with other cars you can get it out a little SL or something like that there's plenty of them out there okay and then the subframe bushings 350 okay there's no put the two phones that are bad up there right remove and replace the transmission so you can take it and have it read be able to be an avid hunter dollars a hundred dollars just to take it out and put it back in the book time is 15 oh geez okay 15 hours so the grand total for everything is $4,200 $4,200 without having the transmission rebuild which would probably cost another thousands of 2065 so I told myself less than five grand I would do it and now we're at six sir right I've always wanted one of these things wizard that's the deal I mean fixed the car is worth twenty thousand dollars all day long maybe even twenty five Sunseeker yeah so I need to figure out if I'm gonna do it at minimum I need to get the thing running right replace the radiator just just so it's drivable for somebody yeah and that's that's spending $1,000 and to have a much more drivable sellable car so maybe we'll start there and if it behaves itself and those two jobs kind of go well maybe we'll keep going okay that sound good sounds good to me see how much I like it after that Oh or not maybe I could have had a Sun Seeger by now if I didn't buy all these hoop tees oh well thank you for watching and then removing put just art she was burp in that video something

Channel: Hoovies Garage

Views: 1,175,612

Rating: 4.7940741 out of 5

Keywords: mercedes, 500e, hoovies, garage, tyler, hoover, review, test, problems, E500, W124, exhaust

Id: 237vPZgALA8

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019