Might be looking at an early 2000's era ML320 200 K miles ish. It is to be used as a winter zoomer.

I'm aware of rust issues and various electrical glitches, am more interested in typical failures that stop the car rather than odd stuff not working / falling off.

I have the capability of fixing absolutely anything on the car so labor costs are nil.

My daughter has a 2002 with about 200K miles. There was a small power steering leak which she ignored for about a year. When the AC stopped working, she took it in to the shop. They said the power steering fluid had destroyed the AC and she spent something like $2k to get it all fixed.

The last time she took it in for alignment they said it could not be aligned because it needed a front right (I forget) tie rod or something like that.

I bought it from Tyler and she has driven it about two years. I really like it but she thinks it is too expensive to keep up, giving little notice to the fact that it is fourteen years old and has gone over 200K. Radio and tape player just quit too.

PS - when you get new tires, make sure they place the jack on the jack pads. If they just jack it up on the bottom of the door it will dent the heck out of it. I had it repaired by NTW Tires when they did it (took a picture of it before the tech was able to unjack it and say it never happened).

All that said, I certainly would like to have one.

By the way, Tyler is a really good guy. You cannot go wrong buying a car from him.

My experience with them it is common for rear springs to break, and they are assemblies with the shocks (no separate parts)- retail is high. Fluid leaks are common at this age but nothing hard to fix usually. I have been really impressed with them whenever wrenching on them at work, they seem to hold up very well. I am looking for cheap bush buggy right now, one of these might work very well.

W163's drive me nuts. All needless things that go wrong. Biggest thing being AAM. Loves to eat keys.

Do you have SDS?

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'80 300SD - '83 240D - '00 E55 AMG - '02 G500

The car I was looking at went away so I'm off the market for now. Yes, I have SDS.

I'm thinking the cause for smart keys becoming unsynced is a low battery. If the read , response, write sequence is interrupted the key will become scrambled. I've worked on various cars that would crank all day if you wanted to but the voltage while cranking would drop far enough resulting in loss of clock , radio presets and sometimes a crank / no run condition. This occurs when a cell is shorted turning a 12 V battery into a 10 V battery with capacity left unaffected.