Junkyard Find: 1994 Mercedes-Benz E 320 Wagon
I've been writing for TTAC since " I Bought My First Tow Truck at the Age of Five" hit screens in 2010, and in all the time since I never once wrote about a junkyard W124 Mercedes-Benz here (though I did write about a successful W124 race car in 2011). We'll fix that today, with this painfully clean W124 wagon found in a boneyard just south of Denver.
In recent days I've been trying to help my mother-in-law sell her obsessively maintained 2004 Accord, which still looks and drives like a new car. This Benz is a full decade older than that church-on-Sundays/oil-change-every-1000-miles Honda and looks damn near as nice.
Most five-year-old street cars don't have interiors this clean! Sadly, I should speak of this E-Class in the past tense, because I shot these photos in August and the car met the cold steel jaws of The Crusher a few months later.
Now, the main difference between a 30-year-old W124 and a 20-year-old Accord is that maintenance and repairs to the Mercedes-Benz cost a lot more, meaning they often get deferred once the car reaches the hands of its third of fourth owner. However, this one appears to have been a runner at the end. Perhaps it had title problems that scared buyers away.
140K is plenty for, say, a Daewoo Nubira. For a W124, it's just getting broken in.
That being said, I've written about plenty of discarded Mercedes-Benzes with better than 300,000 miles on their odometers over the years, and only two were W124s ( a 1989 300 E with 347k miles and a 1989 300 TE with 311k miles).
That's not quite up to the standards of the 601k-mile W201 or the three W123 oil-burners that beat the 400k mark, but the W124 has earned a legitimate reputation for reliability over the decades.
Which reminds me of a personal W124 story: I am friends with a couple, both of whom work in design-related fields. They asked me advice about what reasonably affordable used vehicle offered bulletproof reliability, good crash safety, respectable fuel economy and large cargo capacity. Naturally, I suggested a decade-old Toyota or Honda minivan. This suggestion was rejected with an impatient hiss and chop of the hand, due to Japanese vehicles suffering from "bad design" and minivans being driven by The Wrong Sort of People (interestingly, American conservatives tend to hate minivans because liberals drive them, while American liberals tend to hate minivans because conservatives drive them).
Eventually it became clear that only European— i.e., German or Swedish— vehicles provided "good design" in their eyes, which narrowed the field down to one car that was new enough to have the desired safety features but not so new as to be loaded up with cutting-edge hardware that fails in high-four-figure-cost fashion every 18 months: a late-production W124 station wagon.
Naturally, they went right out and bought… a W210 4-Matic-equipped wagon (which was cheaper than all the solid W124s they looked at and newer, so a much better deal, nein?). That was about five years ago, and that car has burned through the cost of several good W124s for repairs since then. The moral of this story: It is impossible to give useful car-buying advice, don't even try.
So, back to today's Junkyard Find! 1993 was the initial model year in which Mercedes-Benz used the E-Class model designation, making this car one of the first to get the naming system that put the class letter before the engine-displacement numerals.
Naturally, the suits back in Stuttgart are quick to point to the "seamless" lineage of the E-Class, which they say stretches back to the 1935 W136.
Daimler-Benz and (a bit later) DaimlerChrysler were forced to make a choice between aiming for unbeatable build quality and aiming for unbeatable technology/design in the wake of appearance of the 1990 Lexus LS 400. Knowing that the LS 400 couldn't be matched for build-quality-to-price ratio, they had the brains to opt for the latter choice. I think that makes the W124 the final Mercedes-Benz model to be genuinely reliable over a decades-long timescale. Just ask European taxi drivers.
The 1994 E-Class wagon was available to American car shoppers with just one powertrain available (sedans could be had with gas V8s and diesel I6s). The engine was this DOHC 3.2-liter straight-six, rated at 217 horsepower and 229 pound-feet. You can still buy a new E-Class wagon with an inline-six engine right now, by the way.
American W124 shoppers could get manual transmissions in their cars for the first couple of model years (1986 and 1987), with the two-pedal rig becoming mandatory here after that.
This car's MSRP was $46,200, or about $99,733 in 2025 dollars. That doesn't include the cost of a car phone (though all US-market 1994 E-Classes came prewired for phone installation). By the way, the price tag on a new 1994 Lexus LS 400? $51,200 ($110,527 after inflation).
The final model year for the W124 in the United States was 1995.
"This is what carmakers see when they search the heavens for inspiration."
It walks on water when equipped with the new 4.2-liter V8. The resolution of this video is too low identify the competitors who just plow into the lake in pursuit, but we can assume they're Japanese.
This video probably played on an endless loop in Mercedes-Benz dealerships around the world.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
1994 Mercedes-Benz W124 estate in Colorado wrecking yard.
[Images: The Author]
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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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Oof, that one hurts a bit. That was a nice car. The quote "The moral of this story: It is impossible to give useful car-buying advice, don't even try," rings true!
People usually take my car buying advice. Like 90% of the time.