Impression: How the Chimera dream evolutes

2023 is coming to an end and I haven’t had time to introduce a new member from earlier this year. Here is a story about dreams and acquisitions of long term.

For a long time, coupe has not entered my world. In my opinion, due to the distinguish design, it is a completely different product from sedan, they just share the same technical platform. Maybe some people will agree with this view: Mercedes-Benz’s top coupe has not always been a vassal of the S-Class. At least there used to be the W 111 coupe and SLC, both of which have strong independence. In fact, the top coupe was only bundled with the sedan in the 126 era. Reason aside, I spent a long time studying the design of the C 140 to understand Bruno Sacco’s lauded work, which included direct communication with key designer Olivier Boulay and senior director Harald Leschke. This is a passive long march. I force myself to understand another part of the story of 140. At this moment, I may have gone 8/10, and I still cannot feel happy with the design of the coupe anytime and anywhere.

It’s only when I was in the US that I thought about owning a coupe, just out of curiosity, a few years ago you could get them for almost a steal. Even so, I only got a 1999 CL 600, just because it was the last model year and with the blue designo interior, I didn’t fall in love with it after some driving. The car was in poor condition and I decided not to keep it after my time in the US was over.

What really changed me are the kids. As my two sons have grown up, I’ve been fine-tuning our fantasy of travel transportation. This is how Persian Kitty came to this home, and I fantasize about us taking it on hikes. In November 2022, my children took the Persian Kitty for the first time on back seats, I found that even the short wheelbase was too roomy for them. This made me think about whether a coupe with only 4 seats would make more sense. I fantasize about sitting in the back and looking at the scenery, and if I were my kids would be happy, with no B-pillar blocking anything, and your parents sitting right up front. This reminds me of my childhood. When we went out to play, my parents would each ride a bicycle, I could choose to hug my father or mother’s waist. Although we were not developed at the time, the wind on my face, the environment and my intimate contact were unparalleled. Nowadays, technology and society have developed, but car windows are getting smaller and smaller, some cars can’t even open the side windows!

If you find me with 10 kids in my garage, I’m actually pregnant inside my mind a hundred times! Even as a secondary target, the coupe still passed me by many times. The first heartbeat, Fall 2018, I was impressed by a 1997 S 500 coupe in Virginia, it looked so beautiful in the autumn, I really wanted to go and see that car, but it was too far away for me, as a cautious foreign student I don’t have enough break time. I think the 269 Tourmaline Green Met is particularly suitable for the coupe, unlike the sedan, the coupe has crease lines on the sides of the body and they must be emphasized by reflections on dark paint. If it is a white car, then this line is drawed in vain.

I got the blue 1999 CL 600 shortly after this, but I wasn’t happy with that car. Back in March 2019, I saw a silver 1998 CL 600 for sale in Shanghai. Silver is a nice color to have. But I couldn’t find that car in the database, then I was disappointed to find that it was originally in 143 Arctic White, the same as Bianca that I acquired few weeks ago. I gave up on that car because of the color, it is 1 of 3 1998 CL 600 ordered from China, kind of rare anyway. The car later failed the MOT several times and was deregistered by the DMV, permanently.

In May 2019, I spotted a special coupe in Northern California, it was 888 Beryl Met’s 1997 S 500 coupe. The Beryl has disappeared from price lists since MY1995, a designo order much like Bruno Sacco’s personal 1997 CL 500. I also noticed that this car was delivered through the European Delivery Program, which means it had a lot of fun with its first owner. By October, I finally made the move, and even though I was about to leave the United States, I was still seriously considering the car, which was in non-working condition. After communicating with the seller, I was worried that he was downplaying the car’s fault. I still miss the car, it was still unregistered when I checked a few months ago.

The closest deal with the coupe was in June 2021. A 1998 CL 500 in 143 Arctic White is for sale in southern China at a reasonable price. It is a one-owner car, always owned by the police department of a small town, original Chinese order. The C 140 is extremely rare in China, with less than a dozen surviving to today, but I did not pick up it for a number of reasons:

1. We just had Persian Kitty a few months ago, I don’t think I have the moral right to put extra burden on myself and my family.
2. I already have Bianca in Arctic White, a same color would result unacceptable duplication.
3. Even though this car is one-owner and original paint, it still looks like it needs a lot of work.

For the Chinese C 140, 1998 was the most common model year, with a total of 21 units sold. White is the most common, that’s 16/21. Even if I don’t have Bianca, I wouldn’t be inclined towards a white coupe, I don’t think white is suitable for coupes. I tried to comfort myself with the fact that the car later had since been restored and modified in a super bad way. I’m not being conceited, with me, the future of the three cars above would have been different.

I’ve never had a green car and haven’t had a V8 in quite some time. For green, my first choice is Tourmaline, so I zeroed in on 3 1998 S 500s sold in China. The first one was in poor condition and I wasn’t excited. I decided to wait quietly for the second one to show up. In the process, I thought it would be really cool to put the AMG body kit and the 18″ AMG Monoblock that was also painted Tourmaline Green in the center onto a 1998 S 500. One day, the second one showed up and it was in not bad shape, the asking price wasn’t that high, but I gave up on the plan! The Bianca I was restoring at the time had the exact same beige leather interior, it was a hell of a job, and I didn’t want to put in the same amount of effort to duplicate the exact same result. At this point I suddenly thought of the 1997 S 500 coupe in Virginia. How great it would be if I had a Tourmaline coupe! It can fill the three gaps of green, V8, and coupe at the same time, which can save a lot of money and time. Bianca did become a stumbling block for me to get the coupe, but it also brings me back to the coupe.

But I didn’t miss any opportunity to get the coupe. One night in the spring of 2022, my wife’s parents had a quarrel, and I took my wife over to try to persuade them. Instead of going in, I was walking outside, and then I saw a “Mercedes sports car” for sale. When I looked closer I saw it was actually half a car. This is a 1998 CL 500, half, ordered from China, and it was delivered to the scrapyard. Chinese law does not allow scrapyard to sell the complete car, so they saw it in half and the rear half of the car is kept as the main body of the car and destroyed. I determined from the rough photos that the car was in good condition during its lifetime, especially the immaculate KastanieHolz wood trim. For the 140, you only get the KastanieHolz on the non-US 1998 CL. At least the interior was worth keeping, so I transferred payment to the seller at my wife’s parents’ doorstep.

There were some documents remaining in the interior, I confirmed its owner through insurance information. This one-owner car belonged to one of the wealthest people in southwest China. The Forbes rich list said his wealth ranked 266th in China in 2018. Considering China has a population of over 1.3 billion, that means a lot of fortune. The car actually has a lot of exposure on the internet, it’s often photographed with different number plates, which is completely illegal but also the privilege of the ultra-upper class. But he finally decided to trash the car, which he bought in 1998 and has kept, into a junkyard rather than leave it to his family. The maintenance sticker states that the next oil change due at 155,000 km, so its mileage is around 150,000 km.

I think this half coupe will more or less help the coupe dream in future. Gradually, my dream is a coupe in Tourmaline green. This is the conclusion I came to after observing many examples. However, I could never get one in China because I know very well what cars were imported into China and NONE of the 46 sold in China is Tourmaline. Also due to protections for the automotive industry, there is currently no hope of legally importing used cars in the short-term future. I suddenly had some regrets, maybe I should have gotten that white 1998 CL 500 and turned it into a Tourmaline. But my heart would hurt if I did, I have long resisted changing any of the factory spec of any car, and I have no way of knowing that car will suffer misfortune in the hands of someone else. So I was troubled by this dream. Several times I imagined a Tourmaline coupe parked in front of me. It was wearing the same color AMG Monoblock. I felt a little sick.

Until June of this year, I saw a black 1994 S 500 coupe for sale and I recognized it immediately. In January 2019, I was traveling in Singapore with my fiancée, my current wife, and I was lying on the bed in the hotel and saw the sale information of it in southern China. I was so impressed with the black color and 8-loch of this car, I said to myself, how could there be such a boring choice! Someone actually chose a sedan color sports car. It had a hefty asking price, so I just ignored it.

The only difference now with it is that it gets 18″ 5-loch rims, but that doesn’t do much to improve the looks. I thought its asking price would be higher than in 2019, so had no interest in asking. Until a month later, the car showed up again Listed on a used car website at a price that is not a huge exaggeration. BTW anything is very expensive in China and when I say not an exaggeration it is actually over $26,000 which is the amount of money in any country It’s easy to get a decent coupe. Out of curiosity rather than an actual purchase, I set out to confirm the real price and vehicle information with the seller since the identity of the car was not available in my database. I suspected it was a 1993 Year of Chinese orders, but the cars that fit were only green and red, I wanted it to be green, of course, that was the 249 Malachite.

Soon the seller sent me the VIN and other stuff, and I was a little surprised to find out that the car was a 512 Almandine Red! The previous owner must have put a lot of effort into getting this car to have barely any red elements visible. The computer in my brain is frantically calculating the morals of one thing: If I got a car in its original color or original paint, changing its color would be inexcusable. But if I get a color-changed car that no one can restore but me, and change its color again, I’m a lot less guilty! Combined with the fact that there are unlikely to be any natural Tourmaline coupes in China, this is a rather rare and legitimate opportunity. Then there is the price. I tried my best to belittle the price by color has been completely changed. The seller is a professional dealer and he said that this car is selling for the current owner. Eventually we met each other at a point that lower than 2019. The current owner officially got it in 2019 and he, like many entrepreneurs in China, ran into operating difficulties after the COVID lockdown in China and decided to sell this rare toy at a loss. I’m sure the car dealer charged a hefty brokerage fee, so he lost more.

It only took us a few hours to confirm the price and pay the deposit, but the handover was very bumpy. Due to China’s registration restrictions on used cars, the car was not transferred to the name of the actual user, but to the second-hand car dealer who sold it to him in 2019. When we asked the second-hand car dealer to come forward to the DMV to assist in the handover, they refused. It seemed that the owner and the car dealer had some financial disputes. The car dealer asked for a large appearance fee. I argued that it had nothing to do with me, so the car dealer who assisted in the sale paid the fee himself. I think his agency fee was far from reaching this figure, but he said He can’t break his promise to me, he is a man!

As for mileage, no one cares, I mean no one knows the actual mileage, finding a 140 in China with actual mileage is like looking for virginity in a strip club. Interestingly, the dealer who previously refused to cooperate has known the document guy who helped me for many years, and they started chatting in the DMV lobby. He said the car’s current odometer of 92,000 km is actual, and he got the car a few years ago with just over 50,000 km on it, and he bought it in a warehouse at the Shenzhen airport.

I struggled for a long time, I didn’t know if the Tourmaline was the final choice, but I knew I didn’t want the 512 Almandine. First I already have the red Ruby, I don’t need the second red. And Almandine is not my favorite color. You can fully appreciate what the Almandine coupe looks like in the press photo, which is what this car looked like before. I can’t be moved at all, it looks like an old man who has lost his vitality and is playing golf slowly. Anyway, we’re not going back to red, and we’re not going to stick with the original 16″ 8-loch, so a name jumped out at me, Chimera.

Converting existing black body to any other color requires tremendous effort and time, and the Chinese DMV requires color change filing. To save time for later, I had a local contact send the Chimera to a vinyl wrapping shop and ordered the wrapping based on the few pictures I had of the Tourmaline examples. Then he sent the car to DMV for filing, brought it to the trailer.

Now I can officially introduce Chimera. While many cars before MY1996 did not have the model year code, the Chimera was definitely built to MY1994 specification and it was called the S 500 coupe, not the earlier 500 SEC or the later CL 500. Before 1996, the C 140 was not officially sold in mainland China. Only a limited number were imported by Mercedes-Benz China Ltd. in Hong Kong. Sales of these cars were very difficult. 2 were ordered in 1992, then 7 in 1993, a number that exceeded actual demand, so 0 ordered in 1994. The Chimera was one of five S 500 coupes sold to China in 1993.

Note that a total of 4,111 S-Classes were sold in China in 1993, and only 7 were coupes. Because there is no demand for such cars, there is no unleaded gasoline in most areas, there are no highways, and most importantly, people with such wealth do not have such time. What is a typical C 140 user icon? You have wealth and you have time, which usually means you are retired. Well, 1993 was the first year that China began to import private cars on a large scale. The price of this vehicle was more than 600 times the annual income of residents. Allowing for inflation, you might need thousands of years. In other words, you need to start saving money from ancient China 600 years ago to get one. In the 1990s, there were no retired wealthy people. Everyone had just started their business. They were busy driving S-Class sedans to receive customers, and no one had time to enjoy the coupe.

Of course, there will always be a few people who don’t need to worry about their next decade. If you’ve read this far, you’ve read the cops and the plutocrats. There is still a 1998 CL 500 with an NSA pass in Beijing. I had decided to wait for this car to be sold, but then I figured its owner would never need to worry about selling a car. You can see that anyone who owned a C 140 in China in the 90s had a stake in the fate of the country.

Chimera is no exception. It was registered with the Communist Party Committee of Shenzhen Airport. Shenzhen was the most developed city in China in the 1990s, and Shenzhen Airport was one of the earliest listed companies in China. Chimera belongs to the big brother of this giant. Picture it and you might understand why it was switched from red to the politically powerful black, driving a red coupe to the congress isn’t wise. When China took over Hong Kong in 1997, Chinese President Jiang’s plane landed at Shenzhen Airport and he stepped into an S 500, while this more expensive black S 500 coupe was parked not far away.

The Chimera’s condition was described as “a little shaky” by the guy who was doing my pick up job, and I figured I could drive it back from the yard instead of calling a tow truck. However it arrived at the lot with one tire completely flat and there was no way to inflate it, so we put it on a trailer back to the shop. I immediately ordered an old 255/45 R18 to test the car and when I started driving it I found it completely undriveable! It was moving, but it was shaking violently from side to side, which I had never experienced before, and it felt like a wobbling axle.

I then drove it back to the shop and did all the fluid swaps on the lift. I was surprised to find that this car had many recently replaced genuine parts, including the air filter and battery. However, it has 4 completely damaged tires of 3 brands. The youngest tire was produced in 2016, and one of the tires was incorrect in size, 245/55 R18. I inspected the car closely and found a ton of modern modifications, including reverse camera, navigation system, aftermarket anti-theft system and many other annoying things, as well as a Japanese-style flagpole. While I’m not planning on starting any restorations, having these things isn’t even an incentive to drive. In the process of removing these improvements, we also found a huge speaker, which siren used, imagine the user of Chimera in the 90s driving it ignoring any traffic signals.

I also noticed a lot of unusual aging for this mileage. The car has a re-wrapped A piller and headliner, a weather-warped dashboard (which is very unusual for a 140), and a completely torn underbody harness. My intuition tells me that this car has been in some kind of barbecue environment for a long time. Since it has only served the big brother for less than 60,000 kilometers, it should have been idle for a long time. I found out that the first big brother at Shenzhen Airport retired in 2000. Maybe the Chimera has been forgotten since then, and it may have been parked at the unobstructed airport for quite some time.

One of the special features of the Chimera is that it is equipped with 217 ADS, which almost never appears on Chinese orders. On LHD vehicles, the more common switch is placed on the left of center console, where the ASR switch should be. The less common switch is placed on the right, where the ADS should be. On Chimera, we don’t have ASR, so blank left. But we have ADS, so occupied right, make the center console looks like RHD at first sight. Perhaps MB China found these weirdo, so they generously placed the Chinese shifting sticker on the place of ASR. On sedans they were put on the shift gate. What’s most interesting to me is that although it’s designed for simplified Chinese readers, the two passages are written in Cantonese through traditional Chinese, which should be influced by MB China (which located in Hong Kong until 2002). The font also appears to be Kanji (Japanese Chinese characters), which It may be related to the printing conditions at that time.

The Chimera’s seats had been restored, it had obviously cracked due to exposure to the sun. The restoration is poor and it start cracking again, which is going to be a headache in the future. I didn’t plan on focusing on the car much longer as the Octavius still had a lot of work to do, so after relocate the factory immobilizer by using my NOS key fob, I drove it home.

Soon, two of my old friends from Shanghai came to my city for a business trip at the same time. One of them had stayed in Italy for many years, and the other had stayed in Germany for many years. They were both avid car enthusiasts. In the evening, I invited them to sit in the Chimera to enjoy the night view, and offered to let them swap seats. The back row of this car was not crowded at all! A friend with Italian history is a huge fan of Italian cars, he is a training instructor for Maserati, and he also loves this boring German car! A friend with German history is the administrator of wheelsage.org. He personally contributed the most press photos on the website! They sat in the back row to take photos, which was a great vantage point to enjoy the scenery. “Do you feel the wind?” “Not at all!” Looks like my plan worked and the kids will be very happy sitting in the back.

Incredibly, the above pleasant experience is achieved on a violent vibrating chassis. The next day, I immediately took the car to a tire shop for inspection and found that 3/4 of the tire had a bulge. I had planned on putting new tires on while I was doing the repair, but now can’t even do any testing. I’d like to have Continental for its prettier side wall but they are not in stock at the time, so I ordered 4 Pilot Sport 5 from my trusted Michelin store.

It’s not over yet, I need to finalize the color scheme and especially validate my ideas for the wheels. I’m almost completely sure about the Tourmaline choice, but have to finalize the last 1% before the restoration begins to avoid changing my mind when it’s time to paint. While Octavius’ restoration job had to wait due to parts availability in October, I found the time to restore a set of AMG wheels, which are documented in Restoration: AMG wheels for Chimera. Why two sets of wheels? Simply because I have so many AMG wheels sitting around that it would be a waste not to use them. I put the Monoblock on the right side, like in the AMG photo. The wheel on the other side is a BBS Aero, we put a lot of effort into its restoration and I find people like it better too, but frankly I still prefer the Monoblock which is considered to be mediocre. The Aero’s thick outer rim makes the entire wheel look smaller.

One surprise was how close the randomly picked vinyl wrapping looked to the Tourmaline rims ! The wrapping shop just looked at a few photos and ordered the material, but its shade is almost the same as the true Tourmaline. Now I’m a little hesitant to rip them off right away and start painting them, maybe it’s better to use them a little longer to earn back their value. I’m happy with both sets of wheels, but the dark green does make the environment a challenge. You should avoid leaving your car in the dark, where it will look like a black car.

I will start the restoration of Chimera in 2024, I have already started preparing parts since August 2023. Currently, the back seat of Chimera is still too roomy for my children, thus I have enough time to prepare the car so we can go to the beach together when they are 5 years old.