ITT: over-engineered cars (in the good sense of the word, as in...

ITT: over-engineered cars (in the good sense of the word, as in, engineered to sustain more abuse and stresses than they will ever be subjected to).

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milwaukee.craigslist.org/cto/5739636667.html
hartford.craigslist.org/cto/5745548803.html
youtu.be/qu-KZKWXhLM
miami.craigslist.org/pbc/cto/5765424330.html
miami.craigslist.org/mdc/cto/5714377750.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

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>sold making between 250 and 400HP
>frequently daily'd with over 500HP
>perfect dyno queen platform for 1000HP+
>all with a little 2.0L engine

Aren't S4s maintenance nightmares?
I never understood why they called those Lexuses "merc ripoffs", the smilarities are pretty much restricted to the roofline and rear windshield. Seen from the front or the rear they don't even bear a vague resemblance.
Is it remarkably tough though? For example it's not uncommon for old Benz diesels to go 1 mil miles without a rebuild, and their non-engine parts are also pretty tough. They were made to last, not made to be replaced after 3 years.

I think the S4's problems were mostly electronics, the drivetrains are pretty bulletproof and the body is galvanized.

i'm fucking loving my 124, i can't believe how well the engine runs with more than 2 decades of use, the gearbox is still super tight, all of the electrics and vacuum systems still work as if it was new, the seats are still firm and the leather's barely looking worn.

10/10 would buy again, not that i'll ever have to

I'm looking at making my dad buy one after he sells his shitbox lel. The old man is retiring and I want him to have a car he can use as a GT for comfy trips.

Which engine or model? Always loved this gen of merc but disregarded it assuming its typical german unreliable

saloon 260e with the m103 engine, not the fastest car in the world, but it'll go all day everyday

Neighbour has w124 250d (2.5 liter n/a inline 5) with 1.2 million on clock. There is basically nothing to go wrong.

How's life, my Nigerian friend?

there actually is.

people from poorer countries love to take them without your permission.

Holy shit. Any idea on how it compares to the 300D? I've heard the 250D is more desired in the market, but I'm not sure why. Seems to me that inline 6 would be the way to go.

Ive got a w201 with the m103 2.6 and the thing is a monster and sounds amazing with a muffler delete and glasspack.
Its off the road currently to do a megasquirt conversion as i want to boost it but id like to get the efi running first. Using an m104 fuel rail and injectors and ran new lines with an in-tank bosch 255.

Nice. I've heard the W201 was the last over-engineered merc.
Also I didn't know you could mix injectors from different engines, sounds interesting.

i think user's going for a full fuel system swap, the m103 has mechanical injection which is no good for FI

Obligatory.

I'd say that this qualifies decently well

Only problem is the glass transmission, right?

I've heard those are high maintenance. How about Volvos though?

longitudinal engine, front wheel drive
Gotta love the swedes

yeah I think that part of that comes from them using the transmission as an oil sump for whatever reason

unkillable in every sense of the word

The French did it too.

most of the problem's that I've had with mine are electrical (as well as a transmission rebuild and a turbo rebuild and a new timing chain/water pump), that being said the engine still runs fine at 350k miles

and Chrysler

Thread related: thoughts?

milwaukee.craigslist.org/cto/5739636667.html

Price seems a little steep. Also isn't the '91 300E a 6 cyl?

>ALL maintenance records
that's the reason for the price. That makes or breaks a Benz value (although the difference is bigger in S-class)
And yes, if it's a 300E then it's a 6-cyl

>that's the reason for the price. That makes or breaks a Benz value
I see. Even so, a windshield replacment is going to hurt. 4 new winter tires almost sold me off the bat desu. Front bumper replacement worries me, has it been in an accident? Rhetorical question.

Acra Vigor too, if I'm right

>Acra
What did he mean by this?

Angsty Cunts Race Always

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>Never owned an S4 talking about them
Let me learn you dumbfuck. The only two solid things about the car are the drivetrain and body as you mentioned. Everything else, and I mean EVERYTHING is overcomplicated and made out of fragile materials.

For example: The doors are three pieces of metal. There is an outer shell, a frame that the window regulator is mounted to, then an inner shell. All three are mounted to each other through alignment holes, so yeah imagine the trouble of aligning a car door, then multiply it by three.

Everywhere you look in the car you see this kind of creating ridiculously complicated solutions for problems that didn't require it. The engineers must have had raging hard-ons the entire duration of drafting that car.

I miss mine, but god damn I don't miss trying to fix it.

So it was over-engineered in the bad sense of the word, right?

There will never be a car that compares to that slow, timeless beauty.

that's just good engineering, not overengineering. when that merc breaks down it does it espectacularly.

A friend of mine has one. She loves it. That said, they don't do anything for me. The contemporary S-class, however... Absolutely elegant.
Mercedes itself called it overengineered. They were a lot more robust than they needed to be. Probably designed to last several decades.

>Probably designed to last longer than anything Mercedes after 2001
FTFY

If I'm not mistaken I believe the 300d was a l5

As far as everything except for the drivetrain goes, yes, bad sense of the word.

The entire drive-train looks like it was built to deal with 800hp. The AAN is like a 5cylinder 2JZ.

You are mistaken. The 250 was a 5, the 300 was a 6

I wouldn't be so generous, I'd say 1994, with all the eco-wiring snafu. The thing is, they hadn't started to design cars for the lease market yet. Other manufacturers started much earlier though. What you see in modern Benzes aren't mistakes, it's planned obsolescence.
W123 300D was an I5. W124 300D was an I6.

My first car was a 1991 300 se that someone decided to rear end on a rainy day making me hydroplane into a tree at about 25 mph. I was able to reverse off the curb and drive three blocks to get out of traffic and call a tow truck. The driver then told me that his wife fell asleep at the wheel of a w126 on the highway and was rolling about 100 feet. She left with a broken wrist and minor bruises. Mercedes isn't even the same company nowadays.

Which of the S audis is the one that's a maintenance nightmare then? Or are those the RSs?

Wew lad, that's impressive. Aren't modern Mercedes even safer though? Supposedly all the new tech does for safety what it doesn't do for reliability and ruggedness.

Why does it seem like Mercedes is one of those companies that used to make great things and went to the dogs around the turn of the century?

My experience is with an C4 UrS4

I remember reading the B5 S4 goes through turbos like they are cheap, every 80k miles or so. My UrS4 had 240k miles on the original KKK and there was zero shaft play or oil leakage.

They're pretty up there as far as safety. I still consider Volvo to be safer and a little more advanced. As cliche as it sounds, they were built to last. The chances of seeing a 2015 CLA 250 on the road in 26 years are pretty low.

generally you don't make money making quality items any more, everyone is concerned with price

All in the name of profit and wow factor

So is it the consumer obsession with being "economical" (see: cheap) just as it is with the quality of airlines? Although I suppose all these recent recessions don't help much.

It was the same thing with airlines. When more people wanted to fly more often for less money, suddenly airliners had to find ways to make it work to meet the demand. That brings us to the "economy class" we have today, which so many people complain about when it's exactly what they wanted in the first place.

It's sad that luxury brands stooped so low to become partial econoboxes.

Well they profited long before that, user. If they didn't profit they would have gone out of business.

Rota make more profit than Rays. You can't blame Rota that people want cheap junk

>I have no experience with any of the cars I'm talking about

I have some experience with the benz, the rest were questions. I've witnessed w123s keep going. A friend has one, the only problem it has is with the steering. She bought a W124 a year ago, no problems whatsoever and it gets better mileage.
They export mercs north of 400k miles to african countries and they get used as taxis for over a million miles pretty often.

It's the overall social, political and economic environment that the consumers exist in.
And the mass market car industry is a strange beast in general.
If you don't have constantly increasing sales volumes you go out of business or get taken over pretty quick.
Not sure if that translates to other industries but look what happened to Nokia because they couldn't adjust to consumer expectations.

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>mfw these merc w124 300e's are like $3500 on craigslist

The 300e is what I want right?

over-engineered is a buzzword

Worse, it is a meme

I have an angle. I owned an old Volvo 240 that I spent a lot on and eventually crashed (or made someone to crash into me - causing them to require a tow) , then bought another so I have some experience in the matter.

No matter how hard you over engineer a vehicle, rubber bits will always degrade. Older cars had more rubber bits than newer cars with all their vacuum tubes and whatnot, but newer vehicles have plenty of those too. Bushings, timing belts, seals. Seals in your engine. Seals on the body stopping water getting in. Replacing all these parts costs a lot of money.

So people neglected those repairs on old over engineered tanks. So by the time these vehicles got to ~200 000 kays they had issues too just like non-overengineered cars did with maybe their drivetrain even.

So to normies who don't meticulously service everything in their car, these over-engineered cars seemed just as likely to shit themselves at 200k as everything else. Hence, no one gives a fuck and the days of cars engineered to last many decades is over.

Now most cars are full of plastic which is even worse than rubber but no one cares to keep a daily driver for that long. Not only that, private car ownership is apparently going by the wayside as millennials embrace self-driving cars and car sharing and shit like that. Many people think that once self-driving cars come in, no one will care about private car ownership and will just order a car as they need it. It's seriously sad.

I'm way more chill about tailgaters these days so I think I could look after a old fashioned V8 skid machine long into the future. Hopefully

Mercedes were actually incredibly reliable up until sometime in the 90's. They've gone to shit since then, with a brief period of improvement in the late 2000's, but back to angry soap now.

jesus christ what is all this FUD about S4/A4?

My A4 B5 is well engineered and at 167,000 miles its running 18psi on the stock turbo just fine.

It's been all over the internet for a decade that factory B5 S4s turbos are crap.

elaborate on why the borgwarner k03 is crap?

facts about the f20c:
-11.0:1 compression for us market, 240hp
-11.7:1 compression for jdm engines, 250hp
-piston speed was aproximatly 25 m/s, which was the highest until the b7 Audi rs4 beat it in 2006.
- held the record for the highest specific output for any n/a engine until Ferrari beat it with the 458
- has carbon Fiber-Reinforced Metal cylinder liners. Carbon strands are fused with molten aluminum proving an extremely strong cylinder liner.
-uses molybdenum disulfide-coated piston skirts for reduced friction
-crankshaft, pistons, piston rods are all fully forged aluminum

the engines are able to handle 700hp on stock internals, albeit probably not for long, but 350hp is not unheard of for some people's daily drivers.

stock and maintained properly these engines often see excess of 200,000miles and easily live up to the Honda reliability reputation.

Should I lads?

hartford.craigslist.org/cto/5745548803.html

Its been all over audi forums since the early 00s, user after user reporting K03s craping out of them.

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Yeah I have an Audi with a K03 and use many forums. You are soo full of shit.

Holy shit, that's an awful interior. Ugly gauges and shitty wood from some german guy's back yard. Plastic steering wheel too, is this a fucking jetta? Anyway I'm sure it's "reliable if you spend too much annually" so go for it.

Fuck off asshole.
Yeah it's not pretty but it's not ugly either. I mean the gauges look fine to me. The buttons in the middle are a bit ugly but that's hardly enough to say it's shit

>have you ever seen a fucking jetta?

Steering wheel looks close enough to me. And that's exactly the Jetta I was thinking of, actually.

It's got no character other than being overrated by everyone ever. Who looks at that and thinks it's comfy?

i'm considering buying an NA Mk4 Supra (SZ) in australia; how reliable are they actually? assuming it's kept stock.
Gonna use it as a daily driver.

>Who looks at that and thinks it's comfy?
Someone who owns one I suppose

youtu.be/qu-KZKWXhLM

Old Subaru's. Tough cars.

Maybe new Subaru's too.

Twin Cam greatness

>It's got no character other than being overrated by everyone ever. Who looks at that and thinks it's comfy?
I do and I own a Chevy. It looks like a very clean somewhat luxurious 90s car. Way better than most Japcrap or Amerishit car anyway.

You're probably thinking of the B6 S4 and everything with that engine.
People complained about the timing belt on the first few V8s so Audi decided to switch to a timing chain, which wouldn't have to be serviced for life so they put it all the way at the back of the engine to save space.
Problem is, the chain was fine but the guides and tensioners wore out, and if they shatter it's curtains for that engine.
This means that those guides and tensioners have to be replaced every now and then, which requires the entire front of the car to come off and the engine to be pulled out, as well as about 3k in parts alone. Not fun.

can confirm, just bought a $450 twin cam ae82 with 320 thousand kilometers on the clock, and it's clearly lived a hard life. Still runs great though.

PANTHER
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>SZ

Don't.

heres my w201 m102 8v

At least with the first gen audi a8 & s8 the front unbolted easily enough to get the timing belt service done.

Yeah, it was designed to come off for servicing so it wasn't that big of a deal. Pretty smart actually, it means you have a lot more room to work so changing the belts should be a pretty quick job.

I had an E32 730i, had an E38 750, have driven a W126, but i cant understand that amplified nostalgia and new car hate. Had test driven this recently and fuck its nowhere near an econobox. I thought it was great - all the gadgets,the key, the interior,the looks. For a daily this is just great, fuck driving a 30 year old junk having to use casette player and manual seats.

Obviously it's going to be nice it's a brand new car. The point is how is it gonna be after 30 years of use. Would it hold up like a W126?
Probably not, as cars aren't designed to last 30 years any more.

most rwd peugeots and many fwd peugeots just kept going.

That 07 series really shitted up the bed.

i get the point,but why would i care how is it gonna look like in 30 years? im looking for comfort and ride quality. most people get these on a lease and ditch them after 3 years.whats wrong with that?i dont want to drive the same car for 30 years. that said im getting an e34 as a weekend toy soon, getting a new car on a lease too.

What would you guys pay for this 300e?

miami.craigslist.org/pbc/cto/5765424330.html

no more than 400 euros

you jealous guys?

Yeah a real overengineered power steering pump you got there buddy

>bmw
>confort and ride quality

That I have an issue with. If you wanna change cars for the sake of varity that's fine though.

miami.craigslist.org/mdc/cto/5714377750.html

Also saw this, that manual 300e is really tempting though.

>anything breaks
>easily find replacement parts on another one that was left on the side of the road

you havent driven a 7 series after e65 have you? a lot has changed since the f series bmws were introduced, both in ride comfort and material quality.f01 and especially g11 are actually very comfy and well made.