I bought an S65 AMG for 98% off MSRP!

i saw into that man's soul and it was not pretty as usual as car guys that we all are uh one night i was uh browsing through craigslist while on the phone with a good friend of mine who works for mercedes and i happened to type in mercedes s65 into the search bar and up popped an ad for a 2006 mercedes s65 for 5500 now normally when you see these ads that are for ridiculously underpriced car they have terrible photos i mean it's the middle of the night it's raining it's under a street light the description's horrible but these photos were uncharacteristically good i mean the photos looked like they were taken with a really good dslr there were about 15 photos of the car and the description was really good so i instantly messaged the phone number that was listed and got a response at 11 30 at night which i thought was very odd and scheduled to meet him the next day so when i got down there the next day the car was in a really sad state the abc suspension which is a very common problem on these cars was totally collapsed the passenger side trunk hinge was broken the air system for the locks and the power opening trunk did not work it had misfires on 10 out of 12 cylinders and the transmission was in safe mode he had the car listed for 5 500 so i offered him 3 500 and after shrewdly negotiating back and forth we settled right in the middle at 37.50 so while waiting for the car to be towed we started talking a little bit and he asked me if i was married and i replied i'm bringing home a broken v12 mercedes what do you think he grabbed me by the shoulders and stared me into the eyes and said don't ever get married don't ever get married and i saw into that man's soul and it was not pretty he went through the you don't know what it's like when your own children won't talk to you and you don't know what it's like when a sheriff's deputy is following you around your house and you have to pack everything you own into a trash bag so in talking with the gentleman a little bit more after completing the transaction i discovered that he was a broker in 2007 and he purchased the car as a leftover model so while the car was probably a hundred and eighty thousand dollars new i'm sure he got twenty or thirty thousand dollars off the car it was a relatively lightly optioned s65 it didn't have heated rear seats didn't have keyless go or adaptive cruise control anything like that but over the financial collapse he could not afford to keep up the car anymore so once my aaa tow showed up he uh wished me well told me never to call him again and disappeared so as we were loading up the car i discovered a couple personal items tried to call him and his phone was disconnected it's funny so my friend's wife actually has background check software so we looked up the house we looked up him and we discovered the house had been foreclosed on and he's actually still married i don't know if they just don't have the money for the divorce attorney but he's still married obviously separated he was in a relatively new apartment complex and yeah his life just kind of fell apart the weirdest coincidence though the whole thing we had the same birthday didn't discover it until after i left i looked at a picture of his license and saw he was born 20 something years before me but yeah it was a pretty crazy buy i mean i've gotten some pretty crazy craigslist finds but i think that was the craziest one that i found towed the car home got it in my driveway immediately decided to diagnose the abc issue and proceeded to pour a quart of 35 suspension fluid into the car which proceeded to dump all over my driveway out the broken abc line i decided to message rob feretti to see if he was interested in looking at it or making a video on the car and uh he came by with jimbo who uh i recently saw on the channel talking about the car they did a quick video on it and it went pretty viral i think the uh the count right now is at about 700 000 views so that was kind of interesting i got to get into the car a little bit more i ended up replacing the pse pump which is the air compressor for the power locks the power trunk i think the headrests as well and a couple other items i replaced the broken trunk hinge fixed the abc line did a conductor plate which is a common failure in those transmissions and replace the coil pack and i had a running and driving s65 for approximately double what i originally paid i've gotten a couple people that have recognized me i've had a couple wholesalers curse at me for finding that car i actually one in particular i sold a bentley to about six months ago and we were talking about it and i said oh yeah i found this s65 and he goes you're the one who bought that thing he's like i saw that thing you beat me to it by like two hours and they were willing to pay full price i just happened to be there and beat the guy down so i just got lucky clean title bad carfax that had an accident in the front where i think he said he hit a raccoon and then it was rear-ended three or four years after he bought it and i'm assuming that's why the trunk hinge eventually failed which i mean that's a really odd thing it was a really sturdy trunk hinge i ended up doing brakes on it too it was uh not a cheap car to maintain i definitely put in as much as i paid for the car so i drove the car about two to three thousand miles i will tell you that the car is obscenely quick i actually played around with a friend of mine who has a 458 and he was angry he did not want to discuss the the encounter we had afterwards the car for what it was was just silly quick the traction control could not keep up with the amount of torque that that car makes even with the traction on i remember one particular night i was giving a friend of mine a ride and i was at a stop sign and the road curved off to the left and i floored it at the stop sign the traction control kicked in and then it just couldn't handle it anymore and i went around the rest of the turn sideways and i mean in a 50 something hundred pound boat it was a little scary to say the least so i did this back in 2017 when craigslist was really a thing and they hadn't introduced the five dollar classified ad that's pushed every cheap car over to facebook marketplace at the time you could have bought an s65 for a good running driving one for about fifteen twenty thousand dollars nowadays they're holding pretty steady maybe they've dropped off a little bit you typically see higher mileage ones now um whereas in seventeen you'd see ones with maybe a hundred and ten hundred and twenty this car had 148 when i bought it now you actually do see a lot more high mile s65s because people have discovered that while it costs a lot of money to get them into ship shape once they're running and driving they're pretty reliable yes there are some big ticket items that are really expensive like the coil packs that are known for being over a thousand dollars car has 24 spark plugs three fuel pumps i mean the list goes on and on it's insane but the base v12 engine is a really solid engine and one of the best that i think mercedes has ever designed i ended up selling it on craigslist for 10 five i had it up for 12 or 13 000 and uh the guy just truly negotiated me down to 10-5 and said listen take it or leave it i'm not going to an atm this is the money i have and uh i made money on it so i couldn't turn it down i've seen it for sale a couple of times since and the big thing that i recognize on it is that they never fix the front bumper so when i got the car the front grilles were punched out of it and the front bumper was cracked at the bottom and they've never fixed it premier financial services has been a sponsor of ben wiki for the last four years and we can't thank them enough for their support and we love them for that but also because their simple lease truly is a tremendous product in the world of exotic car financing they allow you to minimize your payment minimize your down payment take all the tax advantages that are available for a lease while still giving you the ability to move in and out of cars and accumulate equity so they structure it in a very unique way that's hugely advantageous gives you a lot more buying power and their customer service is absolutely incredible so we love mentioning their team for their continued support of the channel we thank them for that but please visit them at the link in the description below and find out how easy it is to buy your dream car through premier financial services [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 203,213

Rating: 4.9182272 out of 5

Keywords: Mercedes Benz, Mercedes, S65, AMG, V12, Twin Turboi, Bi-Turbo, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, AutoTempest, VINwiki, Car Stories, Max, Rob Ferretti, Jim Best, Jimbo, Savage Garage, SuperspeedersRob, Depreciation

Id: vRpjaNFR0UA

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021