Twelve Cars In A Year!

Thanks iant 

she truly is, I have a V8 engine sitting in the back of my garage from my old pick up, she wants to rebuild it, in the living room! Of course, I thought it was a great idea, I'm a very, very lucky man. 

 

At least with the re-list you can present it more positively - add a few of the trendy location photo's - and rest in the knowledge that a top athlete was saved from being engaged to a complete plonker.... Sorry getting confused again. Hows the arm. - From the Mrs PP hit not the nights up watching bewitched.

Great thread - The format seems a great feature opportunity for a classic magazine or for something like Pistonheads, be a shame to lose it from here but you have a talent and perseverance that deserves some reward greater than our meagre admiration.

I am looking forward to the last of this series Xmas special and the out-takes feature.

Rebel, i agree with everyone else, your wife does sound amazing. I mean mine is pretty damn good, and lets me get away with nearly everything (apart from asking her to duck down when theres a pretty lady waving at me from another car!) But i'm going to have to get mine to try harder, at least she now has something to aspire to! I must confess i am quite tempted to do that, if you'd have suggested that last night you'd probably all be bombarding him with messages by now lol! I wish i could tell you what i was offered, but i think i've pretty much fluffed it there now, so i wont bother boring you all with it. However, in the rare chance that i havn't fluffed it, i'll let you know as soon as i know! I genuinely laughed out load at that Darkspeed, thats funny, thanks! So, on with the show...



And there it goes!! No really, i'm as surprised as you guys! I got up this morning and my phone went off, it was the guy who won the Mercedes, he said that he would be along to collect it. So i arranged a time that would be convenient, and we met up (again) He said that while he was waiting for me, he'd had a good look at it, and was prepared to offer me £1800 for it. To which i said, no. Anyway we chatted about it some more, and went for a drive in it, and eventually he offered me £1900 for it, i said no. So he continued looking at it, and he offered me £1950, by this time i was thinking call it £2000, and it's yours, then i said it. To which he replied ok. So, i got my money back on it, which is good enough, plus, it's gone, and the story can continue. Had i not been trying to get through the twelve cars, and i was just selling my car i would've said no, i'm only interested in the price it ended at. But as he was here, with the cash, i thought cut your losses, get your money back, and move one, which i did. Anyway, to add insult to injury, after he had gone i thought i'd better remove the second chance offer from the bay of E, to my relief the guy had not accepted my offer, phew. Offer removed, oh, i've got a message. It was from the guy i'd given the second chance offer to, it said, that he had the money ready, and he could come and collect it today! Damn, damn, DAMN!!! Should've checked my ebay messages before selling it to the original bidder, i'd have got another £100 if i had! Oh well, more life experience i guess! Anyway, enough talk about selling it, let me tell you about my month of driving it!



FANTASTIC!!! Even though for me this was a re-visit, i quite enjoyed it. I was initially a bit dissappointed as it wasn't quite as good as i'd hoped for, and it was nowhere near as nice as my first one, once you were driving it, it was perfect, it drove beautifully! In my month i covered 548 miles. This took care of 127.93 foreign litres of go-go juice, or for those of us still working in imperial units (as should everyone be!) that was 28.14 UK Gallons! This means that Mr T's Merc was averaging about 19.47 MPG!! There is a price for cruising in a cool car, and this month the price was £140.00!



The 5.0 litre V8 never wanted for power, and wafted along absolutely effortlessly. I don't really think that Mercedes had sportscar performance in mind when they put this engine in these coupés. This was built as a big wafty cruiser, able to eat up miles effortlessly on the autobahns, however it was equally at home burbling about town, although, perhaps a little thirsty, but that was to be expected. No one io their right mind would buy a car with a 5.0 litre V8 thinking that this was going to be a thrifty little ride. Having said all that it was no slouch either as two backwards baseball cap wearing window lickers in their Fabia VTS could tell you lol. The 237 brake horsey power V8 engine could launch this 1.6 tonne coupé at the horizon faster than it had any right to, but you didn't need to drive it fast to enjoy it. You have nothing to prove, you know its quick even though its a big old heavy coupé. I never, well, almost never felt the need to show anyone just how much power it had.



Inside the car... Oh the comfort!! it feels special, this is how i expected the Jaguar to be! It had everything you could ever want in an interior.



The front seats were leather, heated, and powered, even the headrests were powered! (I've just realised that my headrests were doing the naughty child looking at their feet thing again! I really need to pay more attention to that!) The Pistonpoppets also said that their seats were extremely comfortable, and that they had 'Oooodles' of space apparently! Personally i quite liked the grey interior, i liked the wood too, and how it was proper wood, and not just a thin veneer, or worse still, PLASTIC, like the interior of my Jaguar X-type. I liked the chunky type switches, and the dual heating controls. I also liked that everything worked as it should, a 28 year old unrestored car with 182,573 miles on it, still working perfectly! The little device that hands you the seatbelts took a little getting used to, although once it had punched me in the face the first time i remembered how it all worked, and the next time i jumped into the car, didn't put my seatbelt on so as to reverse out of a parking space i remembered that the seatbelt would want to punch me in the face, so from the second time on, i kept my face out of the way, i'm ugly enough!



I'm presuming that Mercedes probably put these on more for the American market, where perhaps the owner of the car may be as luxurious, or maybe even more so than the Mercedes its self! To be fair to it, this is a better system than was fitted to my last Ford Thunderbird, that wouldn't try to hit you if you were hanging out your door trying to reverse into a space, that thing would try to hang you instead!



To be fair to Mercedes, atleast they did think to fit a large warning light that would flash away telling you the seat belt was coming and you should buckle up! It's little touches like this that set the car apart from the rest in my opinion. But of course it should've been a bit special when in 1988 the average new car would cost about £12,000 and to buy a Mercedes like this you would've been trying to pull somewhere near £60,000 out of your Shell Suit pocket... Loadsa Moneeeeyyyyyyyy!!



For me though it's the exterior of this car that does it. The power is great, and the seats are extremely comfortable, but that big coupés bodywork is where this thing really stands out!



I love pillarless coupés, i've always thought that with the windows rolled down leaving that massive hole in the side they just look so uncluttered, and just fantastic.



Like the chunky interior switches i love the chunky door handles, they look like they've been taked directly from a 1950's Fridgidaire refridgerator, and they were clearly built to last!



Driving this car and peering out through the windscreen and down that bonnet you always felt that you were in charge of something very special indeed. It didn't feel like you were just driving a big piece of pressed steel, it had a feel of solidity about it, more like it was hewn from a solid block of Granite!



So, would i have another one? Yes i bloomin' well would, not nessasarily a 500SEC though. I'd actually quite like to try a 560SEC, just to see what those extra 600cc would give you. And i quite fancy a 380SEC, because as i've just said, it's the looks that i'm particularly fond of, and not so much the power (i know, i can hardly believe that i've written that myself!), and i suppose if you're going to have a 560, and a 380, and you've already had a 500SEC, then you might as well have the whole set and have a 420SEC. But these will have to wait, there are still three cars left to collect before this saga is through, and i'll not bore you with another Mercedes. Or atleast, not another Mercedes that is similar to this one, and that ain't no jibber-jabber... You crazy fools!

Indeed it will georgeb. I feel that no matter where i go from here it's going to be an anti-climax

Nothing wrong with 19mpg from a sweet old whale like that PP. I wouldn't be complaining about it. Be just the berries for pulling a transporter or a double horse box too.

I'm not a violent man by any means but I think even I would've had to punch the ebay idiot for his cheek!

I fear you may be correct - Surely it can only go downhill from here?

I reckon you should get Mrs Rebel to write her own thread, i think it would probably be more worth while reading than my thread! Indeed my friend, i wasn't complaining, just making an observation lol! Rebel, surprisingskoda, SmokeEm, you guys are all right, but for the sake of the story, i figured that if i got my money back, i'd let it go. BUT, this is not the end of it apparently... The guy that won it from me has just phoned me up! He wants me to take it back and give him his money back for it!! Why? well, according to him it needs too much money spending on it, to get it to a level where he would be happy about it! The thing is, as far as i was concerned i described it accurately, he has looked at it, and tested it on two seperate occasions, then i let him have it for much less money than he won it for. But he's said that he took it to his workshop for a good looking over, and he isn't happy about it anymore. It was fine for me, so what on earth could've happened to it in the 24 hours he's had it? Of course, as he'd bought it yesterday, and he seemed happy with it, i sent the documents off, i like to send them off on the day the i sell the car incase someone needs to have the documents back really quickly for some reason (like for example taking their car to Germany lol) So as i explained to him, i cannot take the car back, i don't have the documents. I've had this happen TWICE now, once with the travellers about my truck, and now with my Mercedes, both of which i believed were in good shape, and neither had ever let me down, but as you've pointed out SmokeEm, it can only go downhill from here I hate when this happens, it worries me and i never know what i should do. The way i would play it if it should happen to me is, well, i bought it sold as seen, so it's my problem now, as irritating as that might be, but it seems that people think that this is no longer the case. According to the new owner of it he says that by law he can return the purchase item without any reason. Surely this only applies to new goods bought from a shop, not second hand goods bought from an auction? It even says on my listing "No returns accepted" What should i do, and where shall i go from here?

It is his car now, tell him to sell it if he is not happy. Nothing more to do with you.
The end.