Background
Who would you rather designed your classic car – an accountant or an engineer? Legend has it that back in the day, Mercedes engineers would design a car and tell the money men what it had cost them to build it. But at some point this changed and model development became accountant led. The bean counters now told the engineers how much they could spend, and the engineers had to stick to a pre-set budget.
This may be an over-simplification of actual events at Stuttgart, but there’s no doubt that the legendary reputation for engineering prowess and build quality that Mercedes had spent more than 100 years nurturing, became sullied pretty quickly sometime in the late 1990s, when previously unheard of reliability problems appeared and the general feel of some of the firm’s products became distinctly un-Benz like.
Enthusiasts of the marque were horrified. How could a company that had produced cars of such uncompromised quality have got it so wrong? It’s a complex story, but what’s easy to understand is that the E320 Cabriolet sits at the very crest of the wave of MB quality – and that each one lost the company money.
Launched 38 years ago, the W124 generation of E-Class is still held up as one of the finest the Stuttgart firm has ever created. Everything came together so beautifully that these machines bely their age, even today. You can get in and drive a six-cylinder 124 and still find its build quality impressive, its performance swift and its ride effortlessly cossetting. Match all this inherent quality and engineering precision with a shape that seems to have come to define automotive elegance and it goes some way to explaining the mountain of goodwill for this generation of mid-sized Merc.
Four cylinder cars attract Taxi-gags, but that’s a cheap jibe because six and eight-cylinder 124s are truly fabulous. Effortless pace and performance were a given but the later twin-cam sixes were surprisingly vocal and characterful. The pick of the bunch was the 217bhp 3.2-litre M104 that made its peak power at a pretty revvy 5500rpm. Not that any Mercedes-Benz driver would lower themselves to the vulgarity of a drag racing, but were they to indulge, the E320 could crack 60mph in just over 8 seconds, topping out at 146mph.
By the time a halt was called to W124 production in 1997, over 2.2 million cars had been built and sold worldwide. Of these a mere 34,000 – just 1.5% – were cabriolets, making it by far the rarest and most sought after model in the range.
