The 03-06 Mercedes-Benz E 500 is a Bargain, but is it a good used car? Review and Test Drive by Bill

good morning this is Bell for Monty Europa Naples on a deceptively nice Florida Wednesday I think I got the day right today for the first time in a while you know it's it's you know 70s outside not that humid but the misery is on the way when I look at the weather reports up north and I see you know Michigan has like a high of 55 and a low of 35 I'm very jealous I know you're probably not feeling that way in Michigan but when you look down here and the heats come and you know what's coming for seven months god I am a little envious of having some crisp cool weather and frankly I do look better in winter clothes but um well okay it's been a little while since I've done a video I can't really explain I mean we had some stuff to do I just you know didn't have the the motivation to do what things have gotten me very annoyed and it's taken a while to get my brain back in the right place to do a video where I can complain about things and I have managed to do that today I'm gonna do this oh three e500 we're gonna get into whether or not this is a good used car but there are a couple of things that I want to knock out first number one I think it's very important that we universally as a society give thanks to the people who are working hard in this crisis to provide comfort and care to the rest of us and you know they really need a shout out they need somebody to be their champion and two to really come together and say you know thank you for a job well done obviously I'm talking about the the strippers and exotic dancers in the country who have been very very hard hit by this crisis you know for one thing a lot of people just haven't gone to the strip coming out gone done yeah I'm not having any of these people touch me when there's a killer virus going around and obviously that's cost a lot of single moms and college students much-needed funds to keep going and to the ones who have god bless them you know they're out there providing a much-needed service giving people care and comfort and you know risking life and limb to make sure the rest of us cheerful so I will give a little bit of a shout out to those people I hope the rest of you join me and thank them for their terrific service yeah what else do I have I've got the SS Minnow over there this is a boat I'm fooling around with I'm part of this Boat Club down here we're you know they have basically rental boats but it's rental boats you sign up for with a big fee and he can go out on the weekends and you know tool or even the weekdays whatever you make reservations but you know they've gotten very pussified over this whole coronavirus thing so they were closed for a month you couldn't get a boat and even now they've really toned down how it works and you they won't you take one out till 9:30 any day of the week which absolutely is ridiculous I mean the fish are almost meat by 9:30 I want to be heading in at 9:30 with a cooler full of snook and snapper and other delicious things so a friend of mine Chris whose wife is trying to kill him recently got a new boat and this thing was it son long story but anyway I bought it off of I'm gonna throw it in the dock behind the house and take it for a spin around early in the morning to catch some fish Chris's wife I have to say this a very very intelligent woman very intelligent I mean there's not someone make Richard another friend of mine his wife were debating whether or not she's tried to queen f initely know she wants to but is she actively doing it we're not sure but he has all these health problems which are weird and we've all recommended to him that he have his coffee cups checked for residues of antifreeze Chris his wife much more intelligent she is using Chris's own weaknesses against him and left to his own devices Chris will need you know deep fried pizza and have 40 gin and tonics in a night or whatever girly drinks he drinks and what she's done is instead of playing the traditional wife Rome of crushing the life and hopes and dreams of her husband what she is doing is encouraging his behavior so he comes home at night she's offering him deep-fried tacos and gin and tonics and you know big plates of delicious things and she's making sure that you know he just lives a life to the absolute fullest and I think she's hoping for the big cardiac event she also volunteered at the hospital which was interesting during this whole coronavirus thing they called her the angel of mercy because she went around kissing all the patients on the forehead and really just rubbing herself in in all of the medical waste and of course then she would go home to say hello to Chris but anyway the SS Minnow so I bought that thing which led me on to another topic of Gilligan's Island and I realized that there are two indicators when a guy becomes old I can now track it down to well they're okay there's a kind of a weird one and then a normal one so here it is I was looking at Gilligan's Island another friend of mine ow he just turned 47 and I thought I would cheer him up by pointing out that he still had you know three or four years to go before he was as old as mr. Howell when he started doing Gilligan's Island which led me to look at mrs. Howell and I realized that she was a very handsome woman and this was a little bit of a problem after it wasn't where I thought you know okay the minute you start seeing mrs. Howell as a sex figure is probably the minute that you become too frigging old to exist and that might be a problem for me but look it up bad not making it up I mean she is not an unappealing broad for somebody in her sixties what else another indicator that you become old man and this is really the true one if you remember a while back I've got a few truisms one is that the more skulls you have on your car then lower your IQ it's inversely proportional then lower your sleeves the well okay so the shorter the sleeves become on your shirt probably also inversely proportional to your intelligence quotient but the day that you are a believer in blue is the day that you have become an old man the day that you say okay and look at this broken thing I'm gonna fix it with glue that day it rest assured give it up it's over you may as well join the AARP and get ready for the nursing home oh god what else do we have I've got that sport track I really actually secretly liked those things don't tell anyone but I do and I might do a video on that tomorrow even though like seven people will watch it I just have a weird little thing for sport tracks I also think they're gonna be collectible I know I'm getting laughed off the video screen with that but but anyway I could justify it and I'm debating doing it we've got some other crap hanging around I've got this German Bentley coming up that's kind of fun because of the mix with the German in the English we've got an old jag back there I might get too I don't know we'll see we'll get into some of that stuff later if whether or not it works out I'm gonna start buying cars again it's been a little while and you know we're really down to stick stems and Steve's around here which is why I'm doing the video in this old high mileage e-class but I saw it as an opportunity to ask whether or not a car like this makes a great used car now this thing was 60 grand new and o3 it can be bought for in less than 10% of that today and the question is is it a used car that's worth having the short answer you know like the CL or like some of those AMG cars is no obviously it's not I mean it's a terrible idea as a used car for 90% of people for maybe another 8% of people had to maybe and then for two percent of weirdos it's an emphatic yes but so the general mansur and if this is what you tuned in to the video I do apologize about all the mrs. Howell crap short answer no if that's enough for you done you're out with probably in less than four minutes which is rare for one of these so we can get into the longer answer in a minute now this is a w211 e-class you can see that it's been prepared by our mechanic and detail where they've obviously done a very nice job inflating the tires to the proper level looks like we've got about 14 psi in both oh god it just makes me insane I could be wrong I'm sure the other side has more but anyway so it's a no three 500 the two eleven it came out in oh three it was in some ways an answer to the w2 ten which had come out in 1996 and was a pretty good car but Mercedes got a little bit of flack for it and in all of this is the problem for Mercedes you know they are really judged to a much higher standard than most other car makers which does need to some issues if you remember that the w210 came after the w124 which everybody said was an absolutely fantastic car and it was but it came out and I don't know 83 84 and ran all the way through to 1995 and was pretty long in the tooth by the time the 210 replaced it it was also universally thought of as stodgy over-engineered expensive sort of not very nimble to drive around not energetically or youthfully designed just sort of an over engineered stodgy car for older wealthy people and Mercedes didn't want to keep building cars like that they wanted to become a more modern company they wanted to you know reach out to a much wider audience and you go back to the 80s 70s Mercedes is Omar do you think you could sneak over there but you but you can't you can't you know why because the early morning Sun glints off your haircut and it just causes people to look your way anyway Mercedes was building sort of stodgy and luxury cars for a select few and instead they want to build a bunch of luxury cars for a huge number of people and become a giant car manufacturing company which they have successfully done but this car was on the path of doing that and we'll get into that anyway so they replaced the 124 with the 2 10 which was night nimble 20 grand cheaper than its predecessor very very popular a lot of people bought it it was pretty reliable but it was not what people traditionally thought of as a Mercedes it just wasn't as well built as over-engineered maybe to the point of stupidity as some of the earlier cars but it was a commercial success but Mercedes took some umbrage from hearing that it wasn't what it was supposed to be in terms of being a Mercedes so they came out with this the w211 e-class and at the time this is you know before SUVs were completely dominating everything this car sir what came out but 25% look at the birds over there getting ready to come here and keep an eye on them but anyway it comprised about 25% of mercedes-benz sales globally so this was a very very important car for mercedes-benz to get right and in o3 well they didn't they did and they didn't and we'll get into why the styling is what the hell these things are pissed off look at this right here maybe this is it maybe this pounds are flying away I thought that might have been the time they're finally gonna do it the style made they got they really got that on cue nice they kept the four round headlights which was quite nice they the grille angled up a little bit lovely droopy nose kind of steep little stubby tail nice rounded greenhouse I think the design of the car is unquestionably very nice very attractive very pretty and and just lovely to the eye and that's why they sold a bunch of them the problem comes I don't know how to explain this exactly they over engineered this one in terms of electronics you know not the nuts and bolts engineering the Germans were famous for but more of these sort of nanny systems and passive electronic systems which sound really great on paper but become much more difficult to maintain and this car was full of them absolutely full of them and that led to some problems in the reliability front in fact 680,000 EES early e's were recalled over the braking system and this pissed people off who then migrated to Lexus and BMW but part of that is because again Mercedes is held to a higher standard stuff that they might have put up with and cheaper cars I mean again this thing's 60 grand an accord could be bought for 25 you know you know people aren't gonna be as critical of an Accord it's a great car without putting out a lot of money what do you pay 60 grand for a pedestrian sedan you start to get a little bit more picky but anyway we'll get into that as we go so while we're back here let's start in the trunk okay no issues at all with trunk space absolutely enormous and it does take into account that a lot of these cars were used for livery service taxis and such mostly in Europe but I suppose if you were around here as well so they had to fit a bunch of crap in the back and that isn't a problem they they managed to do that this one at the optional fold down rear seating which actually is really stupid that that's an option it cost $100 I see no reason to make it optional just make it standard I mean it's a hundred bucks and it adds utility so anyway I wouldn't second guess the Germans the last thing anyone wants to do but anyways a nice sized truck it has a false floor under there where a lot of people open it up and say oh my god my car doesn't have a spare tire I can't tell you how many times I've fielded that complaint or question but yes it does so underneath this thing if I could get in there is where you're actually going to find a little spare tire and this is just a nice little place to put things you might need like a clay or you know a pack of 45 ACP ammo or any other number of stuff that you want to hide from state troopers you can put in this little thing and put the floor down you can see it also has all the tool kits and stuff they're nice and these little you know toddler tie-down so if you've got your toddler here in the trunk you could run bungees or whatever you call in the ratchet straps sort of keep them secure and they won't be rolling around back there and damaging your other cargo let's see what else we got it's where something just fell off there oh yeah looks like the screw for the license plate beautifully attached by our detailer and let's look under the hood very way down here everything hard to do with just and okay god my fingers in the grilled and shredded alright there is a five liter 302 horsepower 24-valve v8 that was you know this thing was just welcome at any party it's a fantastic engine and they put it all across the lineup and it was really nice to see it in the e-class it replaced the 4.3 class v8 again 24 valves twin spark plugs per cylinder effortless torque and horsepower I mean it felt like it had much more beyond its rating even just a lovely lovely v8 also one that you would find in the s-class which in a lot of ways the c500 is kind of a mini S which is a good thing and a bad thing in O 3 this one was mated to the 5 g tronic 5-speed automatic which is a terrific transmission see I've got better at them shifts perfectly very intuitive driver adaptive learns your style and shifts accordingly and somehow manages to do so without blowing up the way other you don't like Ford can't build a damn automatic but Mercedes seems to have good ones even with a technology in them and a terrific drivetrain so you might run into crap like one leaks or you know pulleys or little water but his stupid little stuff but mechanically these things are bulletproof and that's why there's this temptation to make them a good cheap used car the problem is they get into more expensive stuff elsewhere anyway everything nice under the hood of this thing very proper and we'll get into the rest of the stuff inside love the the hood ornament Mercedes really does have the best in the business all right the back seats very very comfortable your Canadians are gonna be chipper back here they picked up their game on interiors from the 210 which they got accused of being cheap on so they made these things a little bit better they've got this weird little ass pad here which appears to flip up I have no idea what the point of this is other than you know the seats do fold down so maybe that has something to do with it but otherwise why they have those little ass wedges I have no idea the 500 came standard with four zone climate control you can see you've got it back there so each of the outboard passengers could have their own climate so if you've got one Canadian in the back who makes it cold and one who likes it hot yeah they'll be able to make themselves fairly chipper you also get a little headrest back there you get a great little spot to store a compact 9-millimeter 380 also some places for your narcotics up here and maybe a pen some paper clips lovely little center console or center armrest it also can be removed at the back so you can have a pass-through so you could have skis or a sniper rifle dissecting your Canadians down the middle coming out gin Oh up there it'll take a long cargo like that also rear air bags little things like these little flappy into this is Mercedes again who needs to make these matte pockets in the rear aligned with anything but Mercedes does and of course it fails I do like the middle bunch too leather there airbags I like the chrome lined around the burl wood it's got an over engineered genuine ashtray which frankly it's a miracle it hasn't broken but it hasn't you also get a little air vents in the back and yeah I don't know pretty comfy place to be good Headroom too upfront Mercedes always the best seats in the business these are these I don't know what you call them they're sort of driver adaptive seats they're beyond there they're optional you know yeah there they weren't standard unlike the e320 you had the option for him there multi-contour they work in terms of safety and comfort to sort of adjust to the driver and it uses electronic systems that of course will probably all break so you just adjust a manually I do love Mercedes little you know they give you a little seat on the door so you can adjust your big seat with their little little the insects flying around you get things like your memory controls your mirrors your you know power window stuff another fail Aden map pocket line or trunk release it's a Harman Kardon system in this you can listen to Donna Summer iced tea and it's gonna sound pretty good it's happen fire this thing on and again you know when you're out in the used car market I can see why it's tempting to get into one of these things I mean when you're talking about a car that's you know five grand or less and it was 60 grand new you know you do get a lot of luxurious feeling a lot of nice equipment you know I'm not a great stuff that's very tempting the problem is all these little hyper-technical German problems you might run into like you're you know the flan the can bus system won't let that drive authorization recognize the smart key you know for the love of God it's you know who needs it that's the kind of crap that can go wrong in these cars that really annoys people and take some getting used to if you're gonna own one you can see a nice little gauge pod there you got your tach your speedometer or you got your clock which is incorrectly set even though I tell the detailer to set them he just doesn't bother because he doesn't care about anything you getting a little Driver Information Center give your radio till you have no malfunctions and pedometers and that sort of thing temperatures 82 it's too early to be 82 we're just gonna leave it leave it on the temperature you got an automatic headlight control over here Mercedes eventually did have to go to automatic headlights like a Lincoln or something they didn't do that for years your stocks for your cruise control and wipers and here is the issue okay so first of all the brakes that was really the biggest issues issue in this first generation II class the w211 it was called sensotronic and it was essentially braking by wire there was no there's a backup hydraulic setup to it where you know if the whole thing fails you're still connected to the brakes but when its operating the brake feel and the connection to the brakes are all computer simulated and it's you know the more pressure you put on the brakes it's the computer telling the brakes how much to break and people seem to hate it they said it was especially hard to modulate between 10 and 0 some people called it unacceptable and bumper-to-bumper traffic a lot of complaints beyond that there was some failures of the system where it just stopped electronically braking at all and Vienna started to rely on the backup hydraulic system which led to again almost 700,000 of these things being recalled and it was just so widely hated it became a thing it became a thing and when it became a thing it became overblown like the explorers that would roam over or the Boxster headlights on a 911 it just became one of those things that people got to complain about because people did so it just became a you know oh my god the brakes on my e-class suck you know they really didn't but people you know got the feeling that that was an intelligent comment to make so all of a sudden everybody's brakes on an eClass sucked I read on long-term test car and driver had one in their fleet for a year and you know half the people didn't like the brakes and the other half either didn't notice they were different from any brakes or like so that's probably much truer the braking systems were a little bit different but once they got a bad reputation you know it just became a thing to hate them just like the Boxster headlights which is another thing that annoys me the steering variable assist not quite steer-by-wire but it does increase and decrease the effort based on your needs and some people didn't like that by the way that braking system was so controversial and hated that when they did the Refresh of this car in 2007 they just removed it and also in the next generation s-class they didn't bother putting it in at all so you can call that one a botch up from Mercedes certainly in terms of PR if not the system itself but anyway so you've got that you've also got this aromatic DC in this car which is part of what makes it make a mini s-class it was optional in the six-cylinder cars standard in the eights and it stands for direct control or dual control sorry aromatic dual control and it's essentially an air suspension on the car that you know when lifted or lower and as per needed you can control it here with these two buttons this one here if I press it you see vehicle rising and I'm gonna get out and show that to you we talked about not some of the other cars you would use that to you know if you're a gangster to go over your opponent's head after you shot him in an alley but anyway you can see that the car lifts up and then gives you more ground clearance and that's a useful thing if you're trying to get over parking curbs or bumps you know need to clear a driveway or go on a trailer you get yourself a little bit more ground clearance which isn't a bad thing but we're gonna put it right back down now additionally you could use this button to control your aromatic so it we're in sports one Sports two or comfort we're gonna leave it in comfort the difference between comfort and sports too is like more than half an inch of ride height not to mention much stiffer suspension settings and in this car it really does make a little bit of a difference you know some of the Mercedes settings are the difference between comfortable and pretty comfortable and also pretty comfortable in this first jenny class it really did stiffen it up quite a bit by the time you got to sports two but it also spikes the sort of amazingness and engineering it's kind of a classic trick when the engineers can't really decide on the best program for the suspension that they just split it up and you know let the user decide where he likes it and pretend to give him more choices and they'll have to go for a spin so because we're going slow we're gonna get more I suppose I should keep going before we drive so you got your climate control over here dual side again for in the backs the towed also very nice system works great I've never seen this particular radio and anything but a no three e-class it's got this little flip up thing here I don't maybe you need to do that hold on say nobody move that in a while there does please close that's where you can put it in your cassette which obviously nobody I remember when I was in high school for like a year I had the Billy Squier cassette stuck in my car and just I can't really hear him anymore but anyway there you go you got your little kiss add your little screen on top of it you could have a big nav unit but this one didn't have it and I'm frankly at this point that's good because it's like having pac-man in your dashboard but anyway at the Harman Kardon it all sounds pretty good the oldest - we got Christopher Cross going it's fine if you want to go to sleep we've got a little secret hidden compartment down here it's just perfectly crusty nasty thing that you know I don't know good Mercedes uses these weird biodegradable materials so I'm gonna have our mechanic who obviously never checked that replace it but the rubber has decayed and started to emanate crap which is just revolting to get that back down that could have been a CD changer in later cars then you have a place here that's not an ashtray um yeah all right we got a little flippy things here another place that didn't get clean nice spot for another gone and then here's a place where we have candy bars and receipts that again the detailer doesn't bother to clean he's just very very hateful you know I make a lot of jokes about him but with this one today go get a Twix wrappers and and you know this compartment that didn't get looked at I'm thinking he just needs to be fired if not severely executed which in the old days you could do not anymore up here you've got a little spot to put your switchblade you got a glove box there with a nice set of books here we've got the original window sticker and some documents so let's see what this thing cost alright so a 61 grand basically from a base of 54 in 2003 this was not a cheap car it is a nice colored black opal with the charcoal leather I hadn't seen it before so it makes sense that it was special ordered I understand that this doesn't look like a car one of them you know conservative managers would have ordered for the not some very very handsome setup but I mean for that kind of money you'd better get a frigging great car and it's debatable whether people did you have your homeland garage door self dimming mirror yeah you know it's all very nice and obviously you have a very safe car I mean you've got airbags everywhere you've got really fancy brake systems you know you've got all these things that are designed to keep the occupant safe and that's another thing that makes it attractive but you know I don't know that a kid could drive any kid could take an old 124 to college because it was pretty simple even if you didn't really maintain it it would keep going that just isn't the case for one of these two Elevens see we got so again that lovely three O'Donnell there's the five oh and then turn the corner a little bit before I nail it so there's that 302 horsepower v8 which is a lovely ok now we're testing the brakes yeah I mean they feel good to me I mean even the hallway the modulation I don't know I don't feel what people are crying about at least that little thing although maybe this was one of the good ones who knows but man that 3 302 horse v8 is so torquey I think it produces performance beyond that specs it just feel and you know when were Sadie said this thing was 0 to 60 in like 6 seconds but pretty much everyone who tested it got it into the fives a nice nice note man that's one of the reasons I'd be tempted to own this thing if I was looking for a cheap 5 grand card or tool around them it really is a miniature s-class with this aromatic and the the 5 meter and you know sort of all these middle accoutrements and that is the part that I do Micah these cars a turning radius and a Mercedes always fantastic they can almost turn like a ski boat okay I barely have to go into the outside lane tires will it's not man and you see that then becomes the crux so it's so enjoyable to pilot this thing around it's like an Autobahn burner that you kind of forget you're gonna be dealing with really ridiculous hyper-technical German problems every few months to keep the thing running and that's why you know it's you have to have hurry and find out if you're in that eight percent of the people who would say yes this is a good used car anyway there it is this is my long rambling review of this o3e I like it if you do that's up to you I may do that too you know I don't know we'll see I'm gonna think about it and good look at this word track sometimes it just sucks to have a video nobody watches but I do like sport tracks I probably will do that damn thing tomorrow it's a nice one and will otherwise keep going I'm gonna start buying cars again so we may get some interesting crap and soon thank you very much revving and look I appreciate it stay well be good and we'll see you with the next one take care

Channel: Curious Cars

Views: 72,392

Rating: 4.7169809 out of 5

Keywords: W211, E-Class, E320, E350, E500, E550, Mercedes, Mercedes-Benz, Bill, Auto Europa, Naples, FL, Florida, Review, Test Drive, Hoovie, Doug DeMuro, Jay Leno, Tavarish, Donut Media, BMW, Autohaus

Id: lrBIYGgXiZo

Length: 33min 5sec (1985 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020