So I flew down to Raleigh on Saturday to retrive my new '93 300E td. Next time, please remind me to buy a car from an enthusiast, not a lady who doesn't know how to service a car properly. Service records were spotty, from 3 different shops.
</bitch mode> The trip was entirely uneventful, aside from a minor issue with the cig lighter. I saw one cop between Raleigh and Boston. It was a beautiful day for a drive, although the route was somewhat boring. I didn't get right on 95...instead, I headed west and picked up 85, which met up with 95 in VA. There was some traffic in the DC area, most of it heading south. I don't remember having driven past the Pentagon before, and the sight of it brought back powerful memories of September 11. My best friend worked on Wall Street and I couldn't reach him for 3 days afterwards... So it's a nice car. It *does* have heated seats and I think it has an antislip differential (ASD). *Something* kicked in and gave me a warning on the dash when I fishtailed on some wet leaves. So I'm pretty sure it does have ASD. It does have an idiot light marked ASD at the bottom of the IC, and a separate warning light in the tach that illuminated that one time. It also has a couple of good sized door dings and a crinkle in the rf fender, all of which *may* be removable by a good dentwizard. Tires are shot, failed inspection today because they're so bad...and to think I cruised 700 miles on them averaging 80...I'll be replacing them next week with a set of 4 Nokian RSi snow tires. Anyone need a set of OE freshly painted 15" stock wheels with bad tires? Good solid car overall. *Really* soft, I was surprised how soft the suspension is. Runs pretty good, seems to have good power. I averaged 34 mpg from Raleigh to Boston, running at about 75-80 the whole way! CD changer is screwed -- it goes silent every so often and then comes back...but it still reads the cd and track on the radio. One of the stop lights is out, and it's not the bulb. The previous owner had one of the taillight consoles replaced a couple of weeks ago...looks like the other one shit the bed. <sigh> When I got in the car in Raleigh, I plugged in my CB, my V1 and my portable Nav (Garmin Quest 2)...then I found that the cigarette lighter had no power. I drove for a while deaf, dumb and blind, then found that some other things weren't working either. So I pulled over, found the fuse box and found that a fuse was blown. Doh. Replaced it and everything came back. The car is a long legged runner...it really eats up the miles. Comfortable too. I've got a set of euro lamps coming from ebay.de for $150. I'm pretty sure they're Bosch OEM...which will help at night. Stock lighting sucks. My mechanic, who owned an '88 300E for a long while, said that these things *really* suck in the snow...even with good snow tires. I'm putting a set of Nokians on next week...hopefully he's wrong, but we'll see. If it really is that bad, I'll pick up a cheap quattro for winter use. Anyway, I'm enjoying tooling around in this beast...it's quite different from anything I've owned before, except perhaps my old Volvo 122S with 60K miles on it...I think it feels a bit like that... By the way, my last car was an '02 Audi A6 quattro wagon with a sport suspension and 17" wheels, and the car before that was a '95 Audi S6 avant (lowered, Bilsteins, 17" wheels, etc). So I'm not really used to "soft" suspensions... Lee '93 300E 2.5L td 178K
