Apologies for the long absence — I’ve been traveling first to the March Madness games in Ohio and Pennsylvania, watched my son run the Eugene Marathon in April and gathered all my adult kids for a concert at Red Rocks, and then I spent 10 days driving the original Route 66 from Santa Monica to Chicago, celebrating my 66th birthday on Route 66. It’s the 100th anniversary of the Mother Road, and I’m pleased I wasn’t turning 100, too. I highly recommend the 2,400-mile drive and may write about it separately. But I’m back, and CarMax didn’t stop offering unicorns while I was gone. Case in point. A 2016 Mercedes E550 convertible, just in time for summer.
It’s time to replace my 2013 BMW M3 convertible, and so I’ve been searching CarMax for a possible successor. That’s how I came across this pristine, 19,000-mile version that fits our unicorn threshold. Sometimes a car just sits there quietly on the CarMax website, not asking for attention, not sporting a wing or a custom wrap, just being excellent. This 2016 Mercedes-Benz E550 is that kind of car. A sleeper. (Found a few other interesting convertibles I’ll post about in the coming days.)
The E550 convertible is, in my view, the sweet spot of the W212 E-Class generation — the last of the “old school” Mercedes before the all-new 2017 model arrived and went full touchscreen. It’s analog enough to feel real, modern enough to want. Triple black, too. CarMax has 3,093 Mercedes available today. Only 134 are V8’s. Can you believe that about 70% of the Mercedes models offered are four-cylinders?!
Handsome enough inside, although modest in features; navigation, cruise control, heated seats, a rear view camera (not a given in 2016 – they didn’t become mandatory in the US until 2018), and not much else. Looks new. The rear seating area below is adequate for smaller people, but likely hell to climb in and out of, unless the top is down and you’re nimble enough to clamber over the side. Save it for the kids.
Under the hood is the reason we’re here: a twin-turbocharged 4.7-liter V8 making 402 horsepower and 443 lb-ft of torque, pushing the car to 60 mph in somewhere around 4.5-4.9 seconds depending on who’s timing it. Mercedes says 4.9. Journalists say faster. Either way, nobody’s complaining. Power flows through a seven-speed automatic with paddle shifters to the rear wheels — the way the Germans intended, I suppose. At 19,000 miles, it’s hardly broken in.
The 2016 Mercedes E550 convertible started around $65,000 new a decade ago. CarMax has it at $35,998, which leaves meaningful room in the budget for MaxCare — and on a twin-turbo V8 Mercedes, you want MaxCare. It’s a two-owner, accident free car that’s been in Florida and Georgia for the last decade. The car is currently reserved here in Norcross, Georgia. And if you’d rather have a 2013 BMW M3 convertible with some MaxCare remaining, you know where to find me.
Stock No: 28789528 · VIN: WDDKK7DF4GF313382
