My new car journey is apparently nearing an end! I was going to do a thread months ago but was honestly not sure that my order was going to go through due to the automotive chip shortage, COVID delays, etc.
Here's what happened....I currently drive a 2014 Mercedes Benz CLS 550, I've always enjoyed it, nice comfortable care to drive. I was planning on trading it in for something next year, when it had about 85 - 90,000 miles on it. I've kept it looking almost new. So back in late December, I took it in for a service, one of my injector coils went out but it was an inexpensive repair, couple of hundred dollars. When I went to pick it up, the service advisor looked at me and said that in their inspection, they...."found something". Immediately I thought...oh hell. They found several oil seals leaking. So I asked him, well, how much would it be to fix it like it's supposed to? He responded with a stutter and then........$13,000!
He told me they could go in there, clean it up nice and do a temporary seal but that would still run about $3,500 and would probably last about 1 to 2 years. He told me that it's not bad right now, doing nothing I'd be OK for probably about 6 to 12 months, but then you'd start seeing oil. So like any good Audio Aficionado member, I thought, YES, new car time!
I did a ton of looking and reading and after a month or two, I decided on a 2021 E 53 AMG. I thought about going for a BMW M5 or E 63 AMG, but I'm still toting the kids around etc and those two really would be a bit of overkill. At the beginning of February, I put in an order and spec'd it out. It took 3 weeks just to find an allocation here in Atlanta but finally got one scheduled to be built at the end of May. I spoke to my dealer on Friday and he said it's locked and should be done the second week of June.
I have a couple of pictures that I snapped back in January of some customer's car with the same color scheme that I ordered...I think it's really sharp, going with the Selenite Grey Metallic, black AMG wheels and Nappa greyblack interior:
Car and Driver has the E 53 as the number one car in it's class as well as Motor Trend giving the E class the Car of the Year award in '21. Here's some pics of the interior I went with. Performance wise, it's MB's inline six cylinder with 429 HP and reached 0-60 in 3.9 sec and STILL gets almost 31 MPG on the highway!!!!! That's what I'm talking about!