It pays to buy quality
Long-time Golf 2 owners will only be able to smile wearily at a mileage of 300,000 kilometers. And even for the Mercedes "Stroke Eight", circumnavigating the globe seven and a half times with a diesel engine is not an unattainable goal, as Greek cab drivers like to cover ten times the distance with it.
What helped Robert Marx from Schorndorf, born in 1928, and his Mercedes-Benz 200 D, built in 1969, to achieve a one-and-a-half-column report in auto motor und sport , despite a combined driving distance of "only" 300 megameters, is the meticulousness with which Marx documented his marathon drive. For over 13 years, he kept a record of every penny he spent on his Benz.
"I wanted to prove that the throwaway mentality is wrong and that my thriftiness would pay off in the end," Marx explained his incentive, which is still very much in keeping with the times 40 years later. The result of the long-term test: Including the purchase price, taxes, insurance, all inspections and an average of 8.14 liters of diesel per 100 kilometers, using the self-igniting Stroke Eight only cost 26 pfennigs per kilometer.
The higher purchase price for a "quality car", as the passionate accountant called it, paid off in the long run. Also in terms of resale value: despite the high mileage, Marx still got 3000 marks for his well-kept long-distance runner. A similarly well-traveled B-Kadett would probably only have fetched a tenth of that.
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