[W126 Coupe] M1991 560 SEC value chart

[Gerry Van Zandt]

You may be optimistic on the number of survivors, but it's hard to say.  In the US due to privacy laws it's impossible to get numbers from really any source to verify this.  My qualifier was "drivable form" cars because I do think there are quite a few SECs out there that are sitting around and not being used.  Unfortunately most of these non-running cars are not restoration candidates either, simply because of the costs of doing so.

Thus, a "gut feel" is about all we have to go on, and this can be highly inaccurate.  it's the same thing I have to use for the 500E/E500 (although I have some good records of a significant percentage of the cars in the US, including scrapped cars).

I am a member of the Mercedes-Benz Interessengemeinschaft (MBIG) which is the largest MB club in Germany.  As part of their quarterly magazine they do publish once a year a listing of registered totals of each MB model as registered in Germany.  And they publish historical data too for these numbers.  This is comfirmed data from the German government and you can extrapolate the downward trends of registered cars into the future - the line is quite linear.  I'll have to look up the current numbers for SECs in Germany that are registered, but I can say that the numbers on 500E/E500s is just a few hundred cars registered there (which I consider to be cars that are actively being driven), out of a total of more than one-half of the 10,479 production of 500E/E500s that were made for the German (domestic) market.  Historically, this number tends to drop by about 50 cars per year…..

I think the SECs may well be rarer than we all think here in the US.  At least, the good ones in good running order….

Cheers,
Gerry



On Nov 24, 2011, at 11:15 AM, mbcoupes-request at mbcoupes.com wrote:


> 

> Excellent assessment Gerry. I am in total agreement with most of your

> points. I do think, however, that the number of 1991 560 SECs "still

> around" has to be closer to 50% or more. At this point, I have no way of

> backing that up with data but it's just a gut feel. Many, of course, are in

> poor shape and these are expensive cars to sort out so each year the number

> of survivors will tend to shrink. Part of my reasoning is that if there

> were only 25-30% of the model year 1991 left, it would stand to reason that

> even fewer of the earlier years remain. That would take the universe of

> surviving 126 coupes down to a very small number. From the ads I research,

> they still appear plentiful.


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