Junkyard Find: 2000 Mercedes-Benz CLK 430 Coupe
Luxury coupes were falling out of favor among well-heeled American car shoppers around the turn of the century, with luxury trucks gaining sales ground by the minute, but that didn’t stop Mercedes-Benz from releasing a sporty new C-Class-based two-door with a big V8 and big price tag, starting in the 1999 model year: The CLK 430. As so often happens with costly European luxury machinery, this one took a hard depreciation hit during its time on the road, and now it resides in a Northern California self-service yard.
List price on this car started at $49,100 (about $81,100 today), with the V6-powered CLK 320 coupe priced at $41,600. The convertible version of the CLK430 cost an impressive $55,600.
AMG versions of the CLK became available starting in the 2002 model year (yes, they show up in junkyards now), which must have motivated this car’s owner to drop $15.99 on a badge.
Even without the AMG hardware, the CLK 430 was plenty powerful; this 4.3-liter V8 made 275 horsepower. That’s 15 fewer than the ’00 Lexus SC 400 got, but the Lexus weighed 300 pounds more than the Mercedes-Benz.
At some point, probably not long before this car ended up here, the original Black Opal Metallic hood was replaced by this Brilliant Silver one. Perhaps that hood was purchased from this very yard.
How long did the final owner drive the car in this condition? We cannot say.
In its younger days, this CLK was sold used under the factory Starmark program.
I’d need to power up the ECU and the gauge cluster to get the final odometer reading on this car. I’ve done so with an 8xAAA battery pack and test leads on a Subaru Forester, but I suspect that a Mercedes-Benz would resist my crude attempts to wake up the odometer.
Pretty much the same thing as a jetpack.
For links to nearly 2,300 additional Junkyard Finds, check out the Junkyard Home of the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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I can't recall if there was a non-AMG 430 but I so wanted one of these in V8 for years. Given what I know now, probably never going to happen and an R129 would be the better choice of headache.
This brings back some fond memories for me. I sold a 1995 Acura Legend Coupe (which I loved but was really getting up in miles) for an AMG CLK Mercedes just before making a a move to Austin, Texas in the early 2000s from the NYC area.
Fortunately, I got out of the Mercedes before the warranty expired & there was a pretty high demand for the AMG model in Austin & actually got pretty good money out of it considering the typical total nightmare depreciation of German Cars - And it was a really great solid relativity quick car that in it's early interations didn't seem as commonplace as they are now.