[LondonThing]

If they can stand the wheel being on the other side of the car they can offer on my 430 wagon. 10,000 miles of shipping is merely a technicality...

I've had W124's and now the 430 (facelift W210) and my E55 (original W210). In the little group around my place there's a smattering of both types: the 210's are better on gas, generally - that 5th gear in the box helps a lot. Whether it's better to spend the gas money (in the W124's), or to spend on the inevitable gearbox rebuild (in the W210), is debateable. What really makes the difference with the 210 is that several simple failures can drive people to sell off cheap, and all the fixes for those failures are findable here.

I echo the comments about weak batteries, by the way. My experience is that all mercs will turn over when the battery is all but dead - and then once running, weird little bugs creep into all sorts of minor systems. My 430 is clearly a type of buy pretty much unique to London: the "Neglected Toff's Family Chariot" - a car that goes a long while between services, accumulates bumps, and spends a lot of time in traffic. It was sold with a dead torque converter, and was cheap as a result: the point about Benzes is, you can take cars like this and fix them up, and still come out ahead.