When you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, sometimes you don’t have a whole lot of choice. Drop below $2,000 in the used car market these days, and the pickings get slim indeed, even in a car-heavy place like Southern California. Still, there are some choices to be made, and one of those is whether you’d trust an older, simpler car more, or whether you’d rather have some modern safety features even if they come with other newer-car crap. That’s the choice you’ll have to make today.
Friday’s track-daily-burn game went down about how I expected, with the majority of you choosing to torch the poor Chevy Beretta. You didn’t seem to come to a consensus about which car would make the better daily driver out of the other two, however. Some of you thought the Honda was too slow to be any fun on a racetrack, while others thought the nicer Mazda MX-3 would be more pleasant in daily use. I’m too lazy to actually go through and count responses, so I’ll just call it a draw.
As for me, I went a different way. For $1,800 with a pre-dented fender, all I can think is that the Beretta would make an excellent rallycross car. Slap some steelies with snow tires on it, maybe put some lifting blocks in the suspension, and go have fun in the dirt. That leaves me with one of the other two as a daily driver, and since one of them is fuel-injected and the other has a carburetor, it’s an easy choice: the Mazda MX-3. That consigns the old Honda to the flames, but I’ve already sent one second-gen Accord to the junkyard; what’s another?
All right; enough of that foolishness. Let’s move on to some new foolishness in the form of a rusty old Mercedes and a beat-up Nissan.
1980 Mercedes-Benz 240D – $1,750
Engine/drivetrain: 2.4-liter diesel OHC inline-4, four-speed automatic, RWD
Location: Santa Monica, CA
Odometer reading: 208,000 miles (but odometer is broken, so could be a lot more)
Operational status: Runs and drives well
About fifteen years ago, this car would have been one of the better-kept secrets in the used car market. It’s not really worth much, and it’s slow as molasses, but it’s built like a tank, and it’s about as complicated as an anvil. Keep diesel in it, change the oil once in a while, and it’ll clatter along for decades. But is it still a foolproof option? After all, it’s forty-six years old. Even the best of us slow down after that many years, and this car can’t afford to slow down much more.
Seventy-one horsepower. That’s what you’ve got to work with here. Zero to sixty is around twenty seconds on a good day. Oh, and it sounds like a tractor. But it runs great, and it comes with a nice smooth four-speed automatic. These cars are known for racking up some serious miles in some really unfriendly parts of the world; Santa Monica isn’t going to present it with much of a challenge. We don’t know how many miles are on this one, because the odometer is stuck at 208,000, but it doesn’t really matter at this point.
A broken odometer in a W123 isn’t uncommon, but worn-out MB-Tex upholstery sure is. I thought this stuff was indestructible, but these seats definitely need re-covering, or some sheepskin covers to hide the wear. And of course, it’s missing a couple of pieces of the wood trim on the dash. This particular 240D doesn’t have air conditioning, but all it would do is slow it down anyway.
California cars don’t rust; we all know that – except when they spend their lives by the sea, subjected to salt air, which is the case here. It’s not minor rust, either; this has the potential to be structural at some point. This car is on borrowed time. But I wouldn’t bet against it just yet; you’ve probably got years before it becomes a problem.
2012 Nissan Sentra – $1,700
Engine/drivetrain: 2.0-liter DOHC inline 4, CVT automatic, FWD
Location: South Los Angeles, CA
Odometer reading: 140,000 miles
Operational status: Runs and drives well
If you’re a regular Autopian reader, you know that questionable Nissans have become sort of a specialty of ours. There was the former NYC taxicab NV200 van, which was dragged kicking and screaming back to life after ending up in a Copart auction. It successfully drove all the way across the country and is probably still out there running around somewhere. More recently, there’s the Murano CrossCabriolet, which has been road-tripped, off-roaded, and rallycrossed, and is still kicking ass. In that spirit, I present for your consideration this scruffy, unassuming Sentra.
Like both of our hero Nissans, this Sentra has a Jatco continuously variable transmission. Almost nobody seems to like these things, and they do have a reputation for self-destruction, but it seems that if you change the fluid regularly, they can last. I’ve rented a couple of Nissans with this gearbox, and they were fine, no more dull and lifeless than any other automatic in a small car. This one receives its power from a 2.0-liter four-cylinder co-designed with Renault. It runs and drives just fine, according to the seller, and doesn’t have any nasty warning lights on the dash.
The interior is intact, but it’s grubby. I don’t know if those stains on the seat will come out or not. I guess seat covers would be an option here, too. The seller doesn’t tell us if anything in here is broken, so you’d be wise to check it all out.
Outside, it looks OK, but I think it had a minor bump in the front. The front bumper is a little wonky, and the grille doesn’t seem to fit. I have a feeling it’s a grille from some other Nissan that someone stuck in there. An Altima, maybe? Those aren’t the original wheels, either, and they’re either too small, or the wrong offset, or something. They just look weird on there.
If you just need a cheap set of wheels, either one of these will do, but they will be very different experiences. The Mercedes is rock-solid, but slow and noisy. The Nissan will get you up to freeway speeds a lot easier, but it will feel a lot cheaper and be a lot harder to fix if something goes wrong. They’re close enough to the same price that it makes no difference. Which way would you go?
The Mercedes seems like it might be a fun project, even if the 71 horsepower would be miserable here in the Appalachian mountains. But, an old diesel Mercedes is a bucket list car of mine.
The Mercedes feels less likely to mechanically total itself, as long as I can live with annoyances for a while, and by it not having airbags, I don’t have to question whether they still work after the previous owner booped something (or got booped). It’d be an easier choice if diesel cost what it did a year ago, but I’d go try to make some friends at the local diners.
I’m influenced somewhat by the slowest, thirstiest, and shittiest car I’ve owned, a 740 Turbo wagon that I drove for a while with the wastegate actuator arm disconnected and the lower-compression engine struggling out double-digit horsepower, never managing 20 MPG with or without boost. That interior was in far worse shape than this Benz’s, but still very comfortable. I’m sure this one’s still a nice place to sit, as long as it doesn’t reek of probable cause.
3MPH 343 is the Merc’s license plate 3 MPH is a bit slow even for this car.
I did once own a Volvo 343 from 1982, with 90Hp, this wasn’t quick either.
If I was wealthy I’d this this just to save it. they are a great car.
I’d want to care about the 240D. The Rust would make me sad and all the plastic, little non-mechanical bits that would break or sag may cost more money to maintain.
The Sentra has no redeeming qualities, so there’s no love to lose. Drive it into the ground at that price and fix it with duck tape and bungie cords.
I’ll take the Mercedes I can use it’s low power to avoid getting speeding tickets
I’d chose the MB, but this one is too far gone to call it indestructible. A myriad of things could go wrong eaten by rust (fasteners, brackests, pipes), that will be expensive to fix durably.
It my budget is that low, I’d go with the awful boring Sentra. Its maladies may be less critical.
Not the Sentra. Slow indestructible benz
The day I want the neither option.
Didn’t even have to read… the old oil-burning Benz obviously.
The Sentra is undoubtedly the best choice for normal people. So I voted for ze German tank of course.
I really wanted to vote classic Merc but no AC and rust…. Nope.
I love old Mercs, but that one is ROTTEN 🙁