$1,000 S-Class Verses $100,000 S-Class
Which of these two Mercedes S-Class vehicles truly gives you your money’s worth? Car Throttle aims to answer that question.
Have you ever cried to sleep after seeing how much a car you purchased has depreciated in just a couple of years? We know we have. Deprecation is both a gift and a curse depending on what side of the check you are on. The value of a new car drops by around 20% of its original value just within the first year. That’s a big hit. After 5 years, you can expect to lose 40% or more of the original value. So why do people buy new cars? We aren’t quite sure. However, what we do know is that people are always looking for the best deal. That is irrespective of cars.
So what happens when you take two separate S-Class Mercedes-Benz and put a couple of decades between them? Well, a large price gap to start. However, which one of those luxury sedans is actually worth the amount you pay for it? That’s a difficult question. To answer this, Car Throttle on YouTube is presenting us with a W220 fourth-generation S500 built some 20 years ago and a brand new S560e. Will the value of the older car match up or is paying full price the way to go? Let’s find out.
We join both Car Throttle hosts Alex Kersten and Ethan Smale for this video. It is no surprise that the decades-old S500 is still fresh with options and features that many modern vehicles do not offer. It is smart to understand that this car was at the time, a Mercedes flagship car. Thus, it needs to be packaged with as many goodies as possible, whether its a drink cooler or automatic window blinds. While these things might not even worth mentioning nowadays, they were big-ticket items then.
Hoping into the new Mercedes, the change in the interior is nearly night and day even though the design language is familiar. Kersen initially is surprised by the massive options list for the car. He states he “doesn’t even know what that means” in reference to one of the dozens of options. There were simply too many and too confusingly named. The advent of technology is beyond apparent. Huge screens, buttons, cameras, LEDs, you name it. Things like standard wireless chargers for your phone, heated armrests and massaging seats would have been 100% impossible technology for the old W220. Kersten even states “I’m not losing my mind am I?” after experiencing the heated center armrest.
Obviously the driving experience comparison between both cars is also a stark difference. How would any old car, regardless of make or model, be able to drive as comfortable as a new S-Class? While this post is without a doubt tongue-in-cheek, there are some takeaways from the video. That being that there is an S-Class for everybody. Also, there is nothing wrong with the old S-Class per say. As Kersten says, “there’s not that much tech-y stuff, it’s just comfort stuff”. So if you can deal without all the fancy bells and whistles, you might be perfectly happy with an old S-Class. For the next video, we would like to see the same concept done, but with maybe a $10,000 and $50,000 S-Class thrown into the mix as well. That way, you are not running an extreme to extreme comparison, but rather a sample of every step of the field.
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