To all of our regular readers, you may want to pour yourself a stiff drink to settle the nerves before you read this one. And to any newcomers, please don’t judge us. But with this week’s Prime Find, we’re venturing into unchartered territories. We’re going to a place we’ve never been before with our Prime Find’s and only very rarely touched upon elsewhere on the pages of ViaRETRO. Yes, we will indeed have a sniff of the Devil’s fuel: Diesel.
Let it be known, I am not the biggest fan of diesel engines. I mean, they’re great in old tractors and commercial trucks, and thanks to their torque characteristics you might even be able to convince me that they’re well-suited for classic offroaders too. But beyond that I tend to lean heavily towards the higher revving petrol engines and their evocative soundtracks.
But we’re a broad church here at ViaRETRO and there’s no denying that the diesel engine is also an integral part of automotive history. In the mid-thirties, it was Citroën who got the ball rolling with the first diesel powered passenger car, but Mercedes-Benz were quick to follow suit. However, it wasn’t until the fifties and up through the sixties that the diesel car truly started to gain in popularity and other manufacturers such as Peugeot, Isuzu and FIAT joined the game with their own offerings. But the diesel engines were still rather agricultural at this point and it was still mostly in commercial applications such as taxis and delivery vans where they made an impact.
As such, I imagine it’s in an application such as this that most of us first got acquainted with that characteristic heavy knocking rhythm of a diesel engine. While I don’t recall my own first trip in a diesel engined car, I feel fairly certain that it must have been in the rear seat of one of Copenhagen’s many Mercedes-Benz taxis.
And that brings us to this week’s Prime Find, because I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of these early sixties Mercedes-Benz 190D originally served as taxis.
The little ‘Ponton’ Mercedes-Benz 180 had served well up through the fifties, but when the German manufacturer introduced the successor W110 in 1961, a bigger and more modern construction secured the new entry-level Mercedes-Benz even higher sales success. This new 4-cylinder Mercedes-Benz was based very much on it’s bigger Fintail sibling, the 6-cylinder W111 which had been introduced two years earlier.
The bodies of the W111 and the W110 were identical from the A-pillar and back, so they obviously offered exactly the same amount of space for both passengers and luggage. It was only the nose of the 4-cylinder W110 which was shortened by 14.5cm as less space was needed for the smaller and more fuel-efficient engines. Needless to say, this made the W110 extremely popular with taxi drivers which perhaps explains why the diesel version outsold the petrol version by a fair margin – both during series 1 production from 1961 to 1965 and equally during series 2 production until the small Mercedes-Benz finally bowed out in 1968 to make way for the new W114 also known as the /8.
It’s precisely such a diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz 190D from 1965 – a very late series 1 car – which is currently for sale with a dealer in the Netherlands.
The dealer tells us that the Fintail 190D was sold new in the neighbour country Belgium and only came to the Netherlands in 2015. It subsequently went through a full restoration with a local specialist who worked on both body, interior and the driveline. The dealer claims that the Fintail presents really well despite a few small flaws in the paint and adds that it both starts and drives as you would expect a Mercedes-Benz of this era to do. It certainly looks quite smart and charming in the many pictures provided by the dealer. That said, I can’t help but feel that the new corn-coloured leather interior doesn’t look quite up to standard. Have a closer look at the stitching which could have been better. We’ve borrowed these pictures from the dealers website:
But we should of course also bear in mind that this lovely white over black Mercedes-Benz 190D is on offer at what appears to be a very reasonable Euro 12,950. At that price, I guess you can’t expect miracles. Even so, the dealer tells us that there’s a large folder of old invoices and maintenance history which comes with the car. Who knows, it might even document the claimed mileage of 209.500 km, though the dealer doesn’t confirm this. Here you have a link to the full advert: 1965 Mercedes-Benz 190D
So whether we can muster any enthusiasm for diesel engines or not, if you ever dreamt of being a taxi driver during the sixties, here’s your chance to live it in your own little retroworld…
With our Saturday instalment of Prime Find of the Week, we’re offering our services to the classic car community, by passing on our favourite classic car for sale from the week that passed. This top-tip might help a first-time-buyer to own his first classic, or it could even be the perfect motivation for a multiple-classic-car-owner to expand his garage with something different. We’ll let us be inspired by anything from a cheap project to a stunning concours exotic, and hope that you will do the same.
Just remember – Any Classic is Better than No Classic! We obviously invite our readers to help prospective buyers with your views and maybe even experiences of any given model we feature. Further to that, if you stumble across a classic which you feel we ought to feature as Prime Find of the Week, then please send us a link to primefindoftheweek@viaretro.co.uk