“Driven Over 370,000 km in Two Years: The Astonishing Story of a Mercedes-Benz E300de W213”

You’ll have to rub your eyes three times to believe what this car has accomplished in just two years on the road. In some ways it looks almost untouched, but it has put more miles on it every month than most people do in a year or two.

In bazaars, you sometimes come across cars with a rather modest amount of km on the speedometer, but they look like three times as many. You can even be openly surprised by this, but one way or another the seller will reassure himself that these are honest kilometers and that he has them backed up by a number of indisputable documents. And he really doesn’t have to lie – the condition of the car depends more than the mileage on how a person treats the car.

However, we’ve seen cars that had a lot of mileage on them, but looked even worse, and we’ve seen cars with similar mileage that were like new. The latter are, however, absolute exceptions – sometimes thanks to the extraordinary care of the owners, other times simply because someone drives such a large portion of kilometers with them in a short period of time that the visible parts don’t even wear out properly. And the car we have here today is not far from that.

It is a Mercedes-Benz E300de W213 in the station wagon version, or more precisely the S213 type, which was first registered in May 2021. It has now completed exactly 2 years of operation. Normally, a person would do something between 20 and 30 thousand kilometers with such a car, but the E-class is built to be driven a lot, which is what customers often buy it for. But we dare to say that the first owner of this particular Éčko is an extremist among extremists.

He drove an incredible amount of kilometers with the car, it is by far the most driven two-year-old Éčko W213 on sale. We already mentioned the number, but if you forgot it, look at the photos first. You wouldn’t even tell from the outside that this is a car that has been used far beyond the norm, but inside it is evident in places that the car hasn’t been parked in a pensioner’s garage for two years. However, it’s not damaged by mistake, it doesn’t even have a properly polished steering wheel and the leather on the seats is more wrinkled, it just looks like a car with a few tens of thousands of kilometers. But it is nothing like that.

The odometer reads an incredible 370,744 km – that’s not a typo, this car has covered more than 370,000 kilometers in 24 months of operation, so it has circled the Earth almost 10 times in such a short period of time. Look at the display between photos easily three times if you don’t believe it, especially when looking at the other pictures. At the aforementioned age, this meant driving over 185,000 km per year, over 15,400 km per month, over 730 km every working day. Round and round and round. This is almost maddening even from the perspective of a car fanatic.

It does not give many reasons to buy despite its condition, it is simply an extremely used car, on which anything can go wrong at any time. And even the asking price of EUR 29,950, i.e. about CZK 710,000, is not that interesting considering the mileage. But only if you know its real history. With a mileage of around 50,000 km, you cannot buy this version of the Éčka for less than CZK 1.25 million, so for fraudsters there are about half a million reasons to want such a car.

That’s why we’re showing it to you, but it’s one of the adepts at twisting the speedometer, especially by some swindler from the Czech Republic – the history of foreign, especially Dutch, cars is not easy to find here. The car is not mature even at the obligatory 100 km on the odometer, you can easily go even lower with cornering. And sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Who wouldn’t believe?

We are not encouraging anyone to do this, on the contrary, we are trying to prevent a similar step in the future by even mentioning this car. Nevertheless, we have a feeling that sooner or later someone will turn this car in, because in the current situation, perhaps the seller will still have to prove that the speedometer has not been changed upwards. Take this as a warning, you should always check the history of the used car as thoroughly as possible and not accept any compromise when examining the documentation. Even the seemingly impossible can apparently be a reality.

Would you guess that this Mercedes has more than 370,000 kilometers? In two years? That there cannot be 70,000 on the speedometer does not indicate practically anything. Photo: Yildiz Auto’s, published with permission

Zdroj: Yildiz Auto’[email protected]

Petr Miler

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