Junkyard Find: 1986 Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL, Bubba's Cab Edition
The Mercedes-Benz W126 S-Class was the king of 1980s sedans and it sold very well in the United States. You’ll still see plenty of them on the street today and it’s rare that a California self-service wrecking yard doesn’t have at least one fully depreciated, high-mile example in stock. I haven’t paid much attention to these cars for this series, but that changed when I saw a 560SEL taxi in a San Francisco Bay Area wrecking yard.
At first, I thought the taxi markings were a joke, because what kind of madness could induce a cab company to drive a 30-year-old S-Class with the thirstiest engine option? But no, there really is a Bubba’s Cab — and the Yelp reviews mention the Mercedes-Benz cab.
Obviously, a W126 with a mere 250,000 miles on the clock would be a couple orders of magnitude more comfortable than a rattly 700,000-mile P71 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor still reeking of Perpetrator Piss™ from its previous police career. But the cost of maintaining a W126 must have been ten times as high as the cost of maintaining a Crown Vic.
In any case, Bubba finally retired this glorious Benz, and now it awaits its date with The Crusher.
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, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I would love to have one of these, and they are in my price range. While this saw cab duty, it's not unusual to find low mileage examples. I understand timing chain and guides are the only critical engine maintenance, maybe this one had its chain skip?
My mother had a 72 Cadillac Sedan DeVille with a 472 ci V-8 during the 73 Arab Oil Embargo. It got 8 mpg but it was a smooth driving car with a very under stressed engine. It was a very easy car to work on--lots of space under the hood.