Mercedes-Benz 500E
Why 6.5: Shuttled between Mercedes and Porsche during assembly, eighteen days per car. The wolf-in-W124 keeps getting used the way over-engineered Mercedes always are — values crept up without ending the commuting.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
The M119 is a 32-valve V8 that both Mercedes and Porsche worked to keep quiet, so what reaches you is a dense hum that firms up under load. But it is deliberately damped and finished at 6,000 rpm. The sound of restraint rather than of a V8.
8-cylinder · naturally aspirated · 6,000 rpm redline · rated 6.4 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €23k (2000) → €64k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Built before ISOFIX existed, so there are no anchor points at all. A child seat here is a seatbelt installation, and the belt geometry of the period was not designed with one in mind.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The build story gets repeated so often it is practically a party trick, but the ownership pattern is quieter than the legend — these mostly get bought by people who found a good one through word of mouth and then just kept driving it, because a car built to Porsche tolerances does not ask to be babied. Values have moved enough to sting a bad repair bill, but not enough to pull a critical mass into storage. The Q-ship reputation still holds: outrun at a stoplight by something that looks like a company car, because in most respects it still is one.