I’m someone who has a lot of fondness for old, obsolete media. In my office, I am surrounded by, let’s see, six different old computers that use 5.25″ floppy drives (ranging from 90K to 360K) as their primary storage medium, two that use two different formats of 3.5″ floppies, and between five and seven that use some manner of cassette-based storage. Then there’s all the different cartridge-based consoles, and even one that can also use these funny little cards. There’s an eight-inch floppy hanging on my wall, too, and a big Bullwinkle laserdisc down here. I clearly have some perverse love for old media. And yet, despite all this, I hate compact discs (CDs) and am happy they’re gone.
That’s right, I said it: fuck CDs. Granted, this take is probably at least a decade or maybe even two too late to, you know, matter, but I have been encountering more and more people who profess some nostalgia for those shiny discs, and to those people I just have to say, with all due respect, knock it off. CDs are not worth your nostalgia, because they’re charmless and clumsy and cumbersome, and it’s good we’ve moved on.
More specifically, I think CDs were especially garbage when it came to using them in cars, one of the best places to listen to music, period. I’m not just saying this from some elevated and removed position of objective assessment, this all comes from someone who was there, dammit, who lived with these things and wanted them to be great, only to be sorely disappointed.
I tried, dammit. I tried to like these things, because when they first hit the scene, it was genuinely exciting. The first commercial CD came out in 1982, and everyone lost their shit. It was being hyped all over the media, where they claimed it was the perfect new medium, completely resistant to dust and scratches, and would make everything else obsolete:
Much of this is, of course, absolutely true: lasers did read the music off the disc, they were compact, the audio quality was great, but everything about dust and scratch resistance was complete horseshit. CDs were fragile and annoying.
When I got my first CD player, the medium was about 6 or 7 years old; I started with cassettes in my first cars, a ’68 Volkswagen Beetle, soon to be replaced by a ’71 Super Beetle. I finally got a cheap portable CD player for my car maybe around my senior year of high school, and used one of those cassette adapters to connect it to my terrible Sparkomatic speakers I had clumsily installed in my doors.
That’s when I learned how absurdly sensitive CDs were to skipping. A Beetle is hardly the smoothest car in the world, but my cassettes never cared a bit about that. These princesses that were CDs, though, would panic at the slightest jostle, stuttering and restarting, and being unable to get through the first 10 seconds of a song.
Eventually, I came up with a solution like you see above, crudely illustrated from hazy memories. In order to get the damn thing to play any song I had to carefully fold at least two layers of impact-absorbing hoodies or sweatshirts or towels and place that under the CD player, which would then be placed squarely in the center of the passenger seat, so the cushioning and springing of the seat could help the process of coddling His Majesty The Great And Sensitive CD Player just right.
Of course, this was useless if you had a friend with you in the car, and the whole setup required near-constant maintenance and monitoring. But somehow I stuck with it, babying this absurd contraption for hours and hours on road trips, just so I could listen to, say, Hey or Lovecats or Rock Lobster at full volume.
Now, sure, many cars came with in-dash CD players, ones specifically engineered for the automotive environment, and those did not skip. They were vastly better. But, even with the right equipment, CDs still sucked.
The problem is that the physical form of a CD is simply not well-suited to being played in a car. The disc itself is far too fussy about how it must be handled. Remember holding CDs by their edges, being careful not to get any fingerprints on the bottom, because then it wouldn’t play? That’s ridiculous.
Drop one on your car’s floor? The CD is likely boned. Have any crap on your floormats that could scratch a sensitive CD’s surface? Of course you do, because everything could scratch them. Saying the word “grit” to a CD loudly enough could scratch it.
Compare that to plastic cassette tapes, which could be lost in your car for months, until finally found under a floor mat, partially adhered to the carpet via a combination of mud, grime, and probably some vomit. You could just pick it up, give it a quick perfunctory wipe on your pant leg to get off the biggest chunks, thunk it in the cassette slot on your head unit, and that motherfucker would play.
Not only that, but the packaging that CDs came in were awful, too. “Jewel cases” is what they were called, and they were miserable, miserable things.
Remember those? Even outside of a car, in the stable environment of a home on dry, non-seismic ground, they also sucked. If you had a stack of them, their nearly non-existent surface friction meant that every stack of three or more CDs was likely to come crashing down if you just looked at it too intently.
And whenever these cases encountered even the slightest bit of physical trauma, one or both of those little hinge tabs on the cover would break off, making the whole thing an even less stable mess.
Because these cases were such garbage, most people, especially for in-car purposes, would take their CDs out of the cases, then slide all of their CDs into these big binder things:
The binders themselves were a decent solution to the considerable problem of CD storage, but then you were left with big stacks of empty, usually somewhat broken jewel cases, which still usually had all of the album art and liner notes you wanted to save, so they just took up space somewhere, devaluing everything around them.
Yes, CDs let you jump to any track. Great. They could hold a good amount of music. Fine. I would have sacrificed either of those traits for a music medium that was less of a hassle to handle, use, store, maintain, everything. Cassettes were better. Vinyl records have their own kind of novel charm. What do CDs have?
Fuck-all, that’s what. Well, wait, I take that back: the lightning show they’d give when you put them in a microwave was pretty fun:
Aside from that, CDs were garbage, and I’m so glad not to have to deal with them anymore. For a good 20 years, these things were absolutely everywhere, and it was hell. I know it’s annoying to have to re-buy all your music on new formats, but I was happy to do it when everything went digital.
I get nostalgia for obsolete media. Of course I do. But I cannot give CDs that sort of attention, because they did not and never will deserve it. The current noncorporeal nature of modern music playing in cars, where everything is streamed from the internet or a USB drive or something like that may lack a certain character, but it’s so much better to live with.
So, if you’re young and being lured by the shiny, rainbow-reflecting allure of the CD, perhaps considering starting a semi-ironic collection of your own, hear this: stop. Don’t do it.
Go further back and collect cassette tapes, or even 8-tracks, which were also garbage but at least they were fun garbage. CDs are not fun. They’re the self-satisfied prima donnas of music media, and I will happily support launching all remaining ones into the sun.
So there.
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The compact disc did have one advantage: its disc shape ensured maximum travel distance when heaved out of a vehicle window.
Having picked up many of said roadkill (usually burned) CDs, listening to them revealed the reason for their ejection. Some sort of brain-melting bass thumping ‘music’ combined with the lowest rent pop tracks stolen via internet.
Cassette tapes were usually destroyed beyond usefulness by the players prior to their new home at the side of the road.
Roadsides are cleaner now. This is a good thing.
I never had an issue swapping CDs without my eyes leaving the road or touching the sides. You could hold them with a pinch as long as you just barely held it at the outer edge, though I pulled them from the case with my finger an thumb spanning the diameter. My mk1 Legacy had a storage space in the console that fit about a half-dozen CDs in the cases tightly, which was about the right number and location that made them easy to swap out (I preferred it to a remote multi-disc changer). Never had an issue with skipping unless the wheels left the road and then only briefly, plus they seemed less fussy about reading less than perfect CD surfaces. I never understood the adaptor—a decent in dash CD player wasn’t that expensive and wasn’t tied to the car with an umbilical cord where it could fly all over the damn place and get in the way. Never had an issue with scratching and light scratches could be buffed. Tapes sucked, too. They wore out and the tape could get pulled out inside the players (though I admit I didn’t really have that problem, a lot of people did) and, though I got pretty good at judging how long to FF or RWD through a song, it was still a distracting annoyance. CDs also had more useful-sized liner notes included, though that doesn’t mean anything in the car. I moved to CDs after someone stole my best cassettes out of a case in my car and I was almost glad for the opportunity to upgrade, except for how overpriced they were, particularly factoring in that the cheaper cassettes cost more to make. This isn’t really a defense of CDs, though, and I was more than happy to upgrade again to an excellent rectangle that has everything on it.
What I don’t like about the convenience of digital is the consumptive nature of it. The older media encouraged listening to a whole album (while they allowed easy skipping, CDs were so damn expensive that you really wanted to try to get your money worth out of the album you bought for that one or two songs) and I knew the music so much better than I do now. Vinyl was especially great for that with the larger, sometimes creative sleeve art and the engagement required to use it (obviously, this is outside of automobile usage). Yes, I could use the digital media in the same manner, but I don’t and I don’t think I’m alone in it.
I had an in dash Cd player in my 69 Beetle and it work fine!
Only 1 car has a CD player (factory) and it works pretty well. Yeah, the CDs that live in there get pretty trashed. All the other cars have cassette decks and cases of tapes. That’s how old the fleet is. Embarrassed son has a bluetooth cassette .
Could you do a rant on in-dash turntables next?
Trying to use a Diskman in a car was an exercise in frustration. Mine never worked worth a darn. I never had much trouble with actual proper car stereo CD players, since they were built for the environment.
The best car stereo I ever had back in the CD era was a Yamaha deck that was cartridge loading. You put the CD in a cartridge, and the cartridge into the deck. Nicely protected. Of course, the cartridges weren’t exactly all that cheap, and I eventually had about 20 of them. I think I still have that thing in a box in my garage in Maine, though it got retired because the tuner croaked.
But ultimately, I agree, for car systems anyway. On my fairly highish-end home stereo system, I can just about tell the difference between a CD and a decently high bitrate MP3 (at least for pop music – I can instantly tell with classical). In a car? Er, nope, not even on the highest end systems I have heard. And the ability to have several hundred CDs on a single thumbdrive is killer. For every new car since I bought my USB-equipped 328i in 2011, I have put ONE CD in the car, just to make sure the thing worked.
For home listening though, of classical music, CD all the way. But I ripped my 1500+ pop music CDs to MP3 a couple decades ago, and home or car that is how I listen to that stuff. My receiver cheerfully streams music off my NAS. Technically, I can stream off my NAS over the Internet too, though I never do.
My dad taught me to drive a stick smoothly by showing me that if I shifted too hard it would skip my cd. 1983 e21 with the angled radio slot, anti-skip didn’t matter. If you lurched it too hard, it would skip. I got pretty good at that, right up to the point I did an ac delete (mistake) and the stereo was horizontal
I stopped listening to music (or any other “infotainment”) at least a decade ago. Now I drive in silence. I believe a lot of people require constant bombardment by media because they are scared to be alone with their own thoughts. Took me half a lifetime to overcome that myself. Now my silent car is my safe space.
If you knew my thoughts you’d be freaking scared, too.
Hello darkness my old friend hah
I do this surprisingly often now. But I’m talked to constantly at work and then have 4 kids so no matter what, constant sensory overload. The drive to and from work are about the only quiet time I get
I’ve come to this as well.
I enjoy the constant, soothing white noise the Jatco Xtronic CVT makes. That alone is music to my ears.
For those of us unlucky enough to have a vehicle without a Jatco Xtronic CVT we need a distraction from our dismal existence.
Every single type of media has its drawbacks. Records scratched and skipped too and were wholly unusable in an automobile. 4-tracks, 8-tracks and cassettes had limited dynamic range, suffered from wow and flutter and often died spectacular horrific deaths when the pinch roller decides to rip and eject brown media all over the place.
So let’s get to CD’s. Shame on you Torch for not buying a player that didn’t have a buffer. In 1994 when I bought my first discman, I made sure to buy one with 30 seconds of buffer because I knew I’d use it almost exclusively in the car.
Currently, I’m just tickled by spotify with DJ X… I don’t have to think to much and just press play. Skipping around if I don’t like the playlist it selects. Kids these days just don’t know how good they have it.
I’m quite shocked that Torch hasn’t rigged up a See ‘N Say with an arduino-controlled servo to pull the string every 5 seconds installed in the Pao. I mean, let’s get weird.
You’re not totally wrong… but a little wrong.
I do have some bias though. I have a wall in my basement dedicated to a collection of 3000ish CD’s, and I’m currently cheesed that it’s really difficult to find them new for reasonable prices these days. I’ve always preferred physical media as it’s something I have, and I’m not at the whims of a large corporation to decide I no longer have the license to the media I’ve purchased.
For as long as I’ve been enjoying CD’s however, I’ve been looking for ways to enjoy the maximum quantity of music in my car. I’ve been ripping music and storing it locally to play MP3’s in the car for a long time…much longer than iPods or iPhones were a thing. You think trying to get a portable CD player to play reliably in a car is hard? Try getting a small PC in the early 00’s to run reliably from the trunk of your car simply to get access to a large library of digital files.
I credit this pursuit with the Soundtrack. There was a time in the 90’s when it seemed like movies cared about having an amazing soundtrack. Films like The Crow, and Clueless, and Empire Records had a collection of great songs on them. It went from on great mixed CD to several with an in-car CD changer. A 6-disc changer would carry 6 great soundtracks perfect for a road trip. And that was amazing. Much better than cassettes could ever offer (though I do miss the mixtape). I went from a 6-disc changer to a 12 disc in car. I used that for many years. Bolted into many cars. Why listen to curated stuff radio stations were paid to get me to listen to when I can listen to what I want, and in great (for the time) quantity?
Looking back today, where I have 70gb of music on an iPhone using bluetooth, I have fond memories of trying to take what was amazing about a disc changer in my car and boost it with all the music a 250mb hard drive could store. And right now in my garage, I have a Miata that I only just learned last summer had an in dash 6-disc changer. I’ve clearly never used it.
I very much wanted to build something like this back in the late 90s early 00s, but MP3 players kept getting cheaper and eventually jsut got a used iPOD super cheap and never looked back.
Yep. I spent a long time trying to refine it… but the early 00’s saw a lot of small MP3 players with “big” capacities completely change my tactics. I bought a Dell DJ when It came out and it did everything I needed it to and was tiny (for the time).
I STILL buy CD’s whenever possible. I immediately make digital copies of them, but I just HAVE to have a physical copy. I’m too worried about whoever owns the “cloud” deciding to either hold my stuff hostage or deny me access to it.
I too had a Discman in my car in the early 90s. The stack of towels was vastly superior to the actual console mount I had for it!
This.
Yep!
Huh. Never had any of those issues. Used the soft book-type holder and didn’t use them as footballs. Also, since there is NO EATING IN THE CAR*, I didn’t have grease all over my hands when handling.
*Unless it’s a long trip and you are diabetic like one of my friends
I liked cds for audiobooks in the car. When I tried to make cd audiobooks into mp3 files for later use I that I would need to individually rename every tract on every cd in my computer because the naming conventions for cd files sucked. I cannot tell you how many times audiobook files would play tracks in this order track 1 then 10, 11-19 2, 21, 22 etc. And the file names were not the same from disk to disk in the same book. It just sucked.
I am somewhat nostalgic about cds because they were big in the mid to lat e 80s when I spent a whole week’s paycheck on Pink Floyd’s The Wall double CD, which I still own. I also liked that I could play one track on repeat over and over again.
As a human of likely similar vintage, I mounted my portable cd players onto a stand I made out of rc aircraft plywood and old rc car oil-filled shock absorbers. It did a great job of isolating the thing from the jarring movements of an 84 Daytona Turbo and its enthusiastic owner.
In general I agree with you. CD’s sucked in cars. They were really quite annoying to change while driving. Pull out the binder, pull the cd out of the player, find the blank page in the binder where the cd lives, put it back, locate the cd you want to hear next, pull it out, then try to get it into the player, all while steering with your knees.
Oh you Plebs with your single-disc CD players!
One of the best sounds systems I had in a vehicle was the MACH-460 system in a ’97 Ford Expedition. Six-disc changer located in the center console under the armrest (OK, it did take up 1/2 the console storage). Buy a couple of extra cartridges and it was easy-peasy selecting between 18 CDs, way more than enough to get between gas station fill-ups.
3sec anti skip goes far.
As is having an actual suspension not rust.
You forgot the sin I hated. A 6 disk changer in the trunk and nothing in the dash. Yes let’s hear the song for the 43rd time because you forgot to change the disk at last fill-up.
If the 4-track Stereo-Pak was good enough for Earl “Madman” Muntz then it’s good enough for everyone.
At the time of their release, CDs were the worst form of portable media except for all those other forms that had been tried prior.
Sure they had shortcomings, but they were an improvement over their predecessors. I think most of your issues stem from either using the wrong tool for the job (a portable player in a car) or a lack of preparation (your cars sound messy).
The visor mounted disc sleeve was WHERE IT WAS AT in the 90s. I had one on each side of each visor. The equivalent cassette storage would’ve been 2 shoe boxes, or maybe in a different situation, the first 3 inches of the passenger foot well.
Pretty much this. I’d also argue they’re not nearly as fragile as Torch is portraying them. I had plenty of CDs that were scratched and smudged with finger prints that worked flawlessly.
You could “resurrect” them with a rough towel too. Polish a minor scratch in and out and most worked. Some needed an actual polish compound.
Toothpaste works great a polishing compound
Out of 1500+ CDs, the only one that has ever failed to play is the one that a drunken friend in college took out of it’s case and rubbed against the cinder block wall of my dorm room. And even then, all but two tracks played just fine.
What really amazes me is that a couple of mixed CDs that I burned with my very first, external SCSI, 2X CD Burner waaay back in like 1995 (when a blank CD was $10+) still play just fine today, despite having spent most of those years living in the gloveboxes of various cars. That is kind of impressive really.
Ah, the days of regularly sacrificing a goat to keep the SCSI Gods appeased, and banning absolutely everyone from the room where the CD burner was doing it’s thing, lest it make a $10 coaster. Push GO and very carefully tiptoe out of the room for an hour.
I had a couple of *seriously* high-end cassette decks back in the day, including home and car Nakamichis. And even with Dolby C or DBX noise reduction, the highest end metal tapes, and recorded from CD there was no comparing a CD in the car and a tape. And forget about comparing them on my home audio system. Cassettes at best are terrible by comparison.
Yeah, I was in college driving crappy cars in the early 90s and CDs were far better than the alternatives despite their shortcomings. Even with a portable CD player and cassette adapter. Albeit the CD player had to have decent skip protection. Plus, there were mounts for them that were cheap and had little shock absorption stuff that helped.
The big case I had for CDs had pockets big enough to hold the CD cover booklet, and then the jewel cases just went in the trash where they belonged. Plus, cassette cases were terrible as well and typically didn’t have room for any of the art or lyrics.
The biggest thing was the sound quality. Maybe theoretically, cassettes could come close to CDs if you had a terrible car stereo, but cassette quality, both the media and the hardware, was a minefield of bad quality.
I had a musician friend who had splurged on a DAT Walkman, and that thing was sweet. The issue was that he had to copy all his music to that format since finding albums was impossible.
Usually. But they certainly could and did. Especially if you got a cheap aftermarket head unit or a changer. And, of course, the internals could break (although the same is true of most media players in vehicles. I had a 2008 Focus with a factory in-dash changer that worked for about 5 minutes after I bought the thing (used, no warranty).
Of course, all-digital had its issues. The first in-dash mp3 player I had could not read the full USB stick at once. You’d load up a bunch of music and it would shuffle the first 15 songs or something dumb like that (the thing could even play DVDs, but didn’t have a screen appropriate for viewing them, so maybe I shouldn’t have expected much).
Streaming music from a phone has occasional connectivity issues, but I feel really spoiled by the quality, the variety, and the ease of use compared to digging through physical media in a car.
Well, someone has some cross-interleaved reed–solomon coding anger issues.
It’s ok, I’m having them concatenated
Processing…
While we’re at it fuck cassettes too with their tapes getting twisted, stretched, broke, etc or having the fucking wheels break off dropping the reel of tape rattling around inside the plastic cassette.
And the fragility of all the little moving working bits in a tape player. I have decades old cd players that still work and the tape decks have stopped working.
I have at least TWO old car CD players where the CD works just fine but the tuners have died. Baffling. And a couple where the displays died but they otherwise work fine. I don’t think I have EVER had a CD player die, in fact the second one I ever bought, a Sony in ~1988 (my first, a Philips, didn’t have a remote, so I upgraded), is still connected to a receiver in my garage in Maine and works just fine. The high-end Sony CD player I bought 30 years ago still works great too of course.
I have a grand total of one dead cd player in my Timex alarm clock. The rest have survived.
I ditched buying pre-recorded tapes the very minute I could scrounge up the considerable cash that a home CD player cost in 1985. And then the even MORE considerable cash that a car CD player cost in 1989 or so. I think my first car deck was $700. And worth every penny. In-between I bought CDs, then recorded them to high end tape for the cars.
The cool part was that from 1988-1992 I worked summers and vacations at a video/record store. I got hundreds and hundreds of demo CDs for free, as the record companies would give us samples, and I was the only employee who cared. So I got my pick. And then there was the old “12 for a penny” scam college scam. I should probably have done time for mail fraud.
In a car it doesn’t matter, too much background noise to appreciate accurate music reproduction. But with a good home system you can tell a recording is compressed / MP3 within seconds and it sounds horrible compared to a CD. It’s not even a close call.
I can tell instantly on classical music and SOME, very well-recorded pop music in the house. But not most pop music today. Of course, if I cared I would rip all my CDs to lossless formats, but I don’t. 256mbit MP3 is “good enough” for pop.
Don’t hold back, tell us how you really feel.
Sony offered a car mount for your Discman.
A flexible arm bolted to the floor – I used the seat rail as a mounting point – and the platform had four little air-shock absorbers that insulated the upper platform on which you clipped your Discman. Then you plugged this Discman into the cassette player.
This worked well in the 1980 Prelude XE I owned while living outside Tokyo in the early 90s.
I had more skipping in the elaborate JVC boombox I had while living in the dorms than that Discman in the car. It wasn’t until I upgraded to proper stereo components (Sony again – remember the 5 disc Carousel player?) that skipping issues were eliminated from my life.
The in trunk or shoved under some panel in the rear cd changers were kind of fun. You put the 6 disks in there and never changed them you had about 90 songs on constant repeat if you were lucky. The mp3 CDs weren’t so bad you could get like 500 songs on disk and they didn’t skip as much. That’s the one thing I think Tim Cook really has ever said I’ve agreed with the music on a hard drive changed things up. Those semi early infotainment systems that hard drives to rip music from CDs were interesting it seems like a terrible waste of time to me but maybe 1 out of 20 people would do it.
My ’14 Mercedes wagon has the in-car hard drive, 20GB, I think. The previous owner left it full. She had pretty decent taste in music too! Some nice jazz, Streisand, I forget what else. I can’t be bothered, I just have a 256GB SD Card shoved in the slot with a few hundred disks and a few folders of my favorites on it.
That car pretty much does it all. Has the aforementioned HD and SDCard slot, a USB port, a dedicated 30-pin Apple connector, a six-disk in-dash changer, plus it can stream Bluetooth, and it has SiriusXM and a tuner with AM/FM and weather band. if you can’t be entertained in that car you are beyond hope, LOL. And it’s the upgraded H/K system so it sounds pretty good, and it’s a quiet car. Perfect for my 2.5 day migration twice a year.
I knew a guy that got a new truck every few years. He got a Ford with one of the early sync systems that had the HDD and probably spent 8 or more hours in it loading CDs. He showed everyone how you could tell it to play as song and it would. I think there is correlation between people who don’t keep their cars very long and using it like it was a selling feature to them and then they move on to the next new shiney thing. I’ve seen a lot where the owners have no idea it does that or some that bought it used have no idea why there is music just there.
The Mercedes does make it easy, I am pretty sure you can tell it to load music to the HDD from the CDs while you are listening to other things, and it runs at MUCH faster than playback speed while it is doing it. So not a big time commitment to load six at a time. But pretty pointless tech today, and I would be very surprised if the current gen still has it.
I do find it hilarious to have so many options in a car where they average owner probably listens to NPR 90% of the time. And that includes me, LOL. I am rather young and poor to be running one of these, given that historically the E-class wagon had BY FAR the highest average owner net worth of any Mercedes, going back 50 years. The darling of o the olde money set.
Yeah, they used to be pretty bullet proof old money doesn’t like to pay over and over again. Apparently the Koch brothers have some GMT400 and GMT800 Tahoes and Suburbans they drive around in. Idk if you want him but there is guy on your that’s pretty interesting with the old Mercedes called monkey wrench Mike. I’ve only had the older Merc diesels when I find a good deal then move them on but some of the stuff he finds for cheap and just runs makes me think I should look around for what he gets into.
I’ve had a ’79 300TD, an ’88 300TE, and now my E350. Great cars all in their own eras. Though to be honest, I would rather have a super minty w124 than the one I have. But then I wouldn’t want to use it like a rented mule as I do my current one.
FOR SURE a quietly loaded Tahoe\Suburban or Yukon is and long has been the choice of the “sporty” old money set where I am from – and back in the day, the old Grand Wagoneers (the American Range Rover). NEVER an Escalade – too NOKD. If you see an Escalade in the nicer parts of Maine, it inevitably has MA or NJ plates on it, and has tacky people in it.
I just saw an gmt800 Escalade being used as painters truck. Absolutely destroyed and was thinking about the irony. It’s cheaper then the same era work truck. Massholes will try to kill you much like Californians seem to want to kill everyone on the road west of the Mississippi and now in Nashville. Yeah I might try to find a w124 or w210 in cheap but ok condition. I know too many people that have tried their luck at a r171 because they seem stupid cheap but wow the issues.
The second most expensive car in the world is a cheap Mercedes (the most expensive is a cheap Porsche). Buy the best or don’t bother. I love them, but I have no illusions about the running costs, even with significant DIY.
I’d take a long or short Yukon any day over a regular pickup truck for almost any sort of business purpose. though a VAN is more useful still. But used vans are also pricy these days.
Bad for cars? Sure. Bad in general? I will fight you!