The Benz that Porsche built

Mercedes-Benz 500E (W124)

Porsche-built V8 sleeper · 1991–1993 · Black · Investment-grade

ARTIGO — INSTAGRAM / CARROSSEL / BLOG

And why nobody recognised it at the time.

In 1991, you could walk past a black W124 saloon in a Munich side street and think nothing of it. It had four doors. It had a three-pointed star. It looked exactly like a taxi.

It was not a taxi.

Under the bonnet sat the 5.0-litre M119 V8 from the 500SL. Behind the wheel arches — subtly flared, almost invisibly — hid wider tracks engineered to hold the car at 250 km/h. And every single one of them had been hand-assembled at a factory in Zuffenhausen. Not Mercedes' factory. Porsche's.

Mercedes-Benz was running at full capacity in Sindelfingen. The 500E's wider body — those flared front wings — made it incompatible with the standard production line. Rather than reconfigure a plant for what would be a low-volume variant, they commissioned Porsche as the manufacturer.

Each car made the journey between Stuttgart and Sindelfingen three times. Bodies were built by Mercedes. Transported to Porsche for hand assembly. Sent back to Mercedes to be painted. Back to Porsche for final installation. Back to Mercedes for inspection. Eighteen days per car, from start to delivery.

10,479 units were built across the entire production run. All left-hand drive. The black pre-facelift 500E — the W124.036, the purest expression of the formula — is now one of the most coveted sleepers in the investment car world.

In March 2026, Jerry Seinfeld's 1992 example — Brilliant Silver, 2,300 miles, never driven — sold at Amelia Island for $357,000. Against a pre-sale estimate of $180,000–$240,000.

The market has spoken. The question is whether you were listening.

SPI Curated sources, verifies, and delivers collector vehicles from Europe and Japan to Brazil, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The 500E is a benchmark — a car that rewards the buyer who understood it before the market did.

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