This is great journalism.

I wish it was a real thing. In the meantime, enjoy the Swedish terror-tractor:

I cannot give this enough stars. Jalopnik is the true home of poor automotive design, neglected badge-engineered compromises, duct-tape fixes, soft Corinthian leather, captive imports, and NSU rotary engine swaps into Korean tractors.

“Properly sorted”, and the full range of preventative maintenance, are unlikely to go hand-in-hand with a cheap SL - and even if you do those, you can still get nasty surprises. I never want to see boiling Pentosin again.

They really are awesome cars, and the V12 sounds fantastic; but a cheap Mercedes with ABC will be the most expensive car you ever own.

Sabine Schmitz would make a superb Stig.

I would daily-drive a Scion T-LC. Make it happen.

She is pretty, but the resto project will drive you to the brink of bankruptcy and insanity.

Mileage is not a problem here. 300SD with OM617 and MB-tex? For this one, 250,000 miles is just a taster. She’ll keep on driving indefinitely. Even after the oceans have boiled away, humans have gone extinct, and the world is run by giant cockroaches who have learned how to drive - the cockroaches will be driving a…

Want a car that drives itself? You won’t get that from Porsche, or Lamborghini for that matter. The CEO of the former rebuffed the idea to a German newspaper. Via Reuters:

Below VW, although all VW brands seem to have converged over time. Ten or twenty years ago, the SEAT brand was positioned as cheap and cool and quirky; Škoda as an affordable car that wouldn’t actually fall apart; Audi as the premium option; and VW in the middle. Since then, VAG has reaped all the benefits of…

The idea is that the B-1 could not just work as an attack aircraft but also as a giant sensor node over the battlefields of the future.

How strange! You were “there” for a couple of weeks but you got an anecdote about how guns would keep you safe, even though you didn’t have a gun.

So cute. I want one.

A literal approach to the letters will drive us to madness. The “L” in “SL” and “CL” stands for leicht but both of them are heavy cars. They’re nice cars, yes, but the CL weighs enough to have its own moons, and the current SL500 is still heavier than a 911 or a Jaguar XK even after it’s been on a diet.

Pretty much, yes.

A lot of things can fail in a few-year-old $20k S-class, but probably not the engine. Those things are pretty sturdy. Things like the cabin electronics and the suspension are what you should worry about.