Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 1976 Mercedes-Benz 450 SL
If you wanted to celebrate the 200th birthday of the United States of America by buying a new 1976 car, you could be a patriot of the proletariat and get a Chevy with red-white-and-blue stripes and/or interior (option code 1776!), enjoy Gerald Ford's peace with freedom by picking up a new Bicentennial Edition Ford F-150 or shake your fist at encroaching — and apparently Communist-inspired — safety regulations by purchasing one of the very last Cadillac Eldorado convertibles (Eldo ragtop production restarted eight years later). Or you could laugh cynically at those Detroit-centric rubes, brush the white-powder residue off a briefcase containing $19,359 in cash ($106,901 in 2023 dollars) and exchange it for a gleaming new 450 SL roadster. Nearly a half-century later, here's one of those cars, found in a self-service car graveyard just south of the Denver city limits.
The Mercedes-Benz R107 first went on sale in 1971, and it set the record (which still stands) for longest production run of any Mercedes-Benz automobile by being built through 1989.
It was sold as a two-seat convertible with optional detachable roof (which remained with this car to the end), while a hardtop coupe version was available through the early 1980s.
These cars were built very, very well and held together for decades with proper maintenance. However, once one begins to look rough, the cost of restoration generally exceeds real-world resale value by quite a bit. This means that plenty of R107s languish for years in driveways and yards, then end up taking the inevitable final trip to the knacker's yard. As long as I've been hanging out in junkyards, I've been finding discarded R107s with depressing regularity.
This one was too far gone to have much chance of ever being put back into service. At some point, the decklid or at least the decklid badge from a late-1980s car was installed.
