Tested: 1988 Mercedes-Benz 300TE

From the August 1988 issue of Car and Driver.

Driving the Mercedes 300TE station wagon is like having Gregory Peck for your father. If you’ve ever seen Gentleman’s Agreementor To Kill a Mockingbird, you know what we’re talking about: a character of incorruptible morals, devoted family dude, solid citizen, conservative dresser, reliable as the sun, defender of the little guy, runner-up for the Mother Teresa do-right-by-your-fellow-man award, and one of the most sensible guys ever to wear black oxfords.

As neat as all this may sound, it must be a massive snore to live with such a guy 24 hours a day. It would be like living with a combination of the pope and J. Edgar Hoover: you’d get lots of mature advice, but, jeez, the pressure to live up to those standards would drive you psycho. You’d never get away with mooning a bunch of Shriners or yelling “Single!” to every girl who walks by on the beach. You’d spend the rest of your life in your room.

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This wagon doesn’t encourage much tomfoolery (whatever that is): the 300TE is straight-down-the-road, triple-sec, one more-outburst-young-man-and-it’s military-school-for-you sensible. Just get into the thing and drive. The first thing you notice is that it has an automatic. The reason no manual is available has nothing to do with marketing: it’s so you can’t burn rubber. The next thing you notice is that the 300TE feels as if it were carved from a solid ingot of steel, for that safe-as-a-house feeling. Go ahead and drive it off a cliff. Unless you land on a grenade, you probably won’t get a dent.

The engine is a little less staid. Mercifully, Mercedes dropped the TE’s diesel at the end of 1987 and replaced it with a 3.0-liter gas burner; even Mercedes finally realized that nothing is as boring as a diesel, except maybe George Bush or Michael Dukakis. (In addition; diesel emissions standards were getting increasingly stringent.) The 3.0-liter produces 177 horsepower and 188 pound-feet of torque more than adequate for motivating the wagon’s 3548 pounds. The TE gets to 60 in 8.2 seconds, which is as quick as some respectable sports sedans we’ve tested and definitely at the hot end of the wagon performance spectrum.

This is the same engine you’ll find in the 300E and CE. For wagon duty, though, Mercedes adds a shorter, 3.27: I final drive ratio, versus 3.07: I in the sedans. The result is more thrust than most Peck types need: enough to push the TE to 126 mph. We can’t see Gregory Peck driving that fast, even when he’s trying to keep an innocent man from burning on the chair; he probably just phones the governor instead. But he doesn’t know what he’s missing. What’s true of all Mercedes sedans is true of the 300TE: the faster you drive it, the better it feels. At the limit of velocity it settles into a nice, freight-trainish groove, and doesn’t quit until the tank runs dry.

The TE’s suspension is also similar to the 300 sedans’ but includes load-leveling hydropneumatic rear shocks. Load leveling keeps Gregory Peck types from being driveway tail-draggers when they deliver swing sets and groceries to disadvantaged kids and halfway houses.

Another sensible feature of this Peckmobile is all the room it offers for people and things. And what could be more sensible than three headrests for the back seat and an optional cargo net to keep your Parcheesi boards and emergency gray flannel suits from smacking the back of your head when you brake hard and get into the standard anti-lock system? At 70 mph-a frightfully illegal speed, but allowable if you’re rushing a little orphan boy to the hospital for a head transplant the wagon needs only 182 feet to come to a halt. And how about this for sensible: headlight wipers. They’re the auto equivalent of having one of those hotel electric shoe polishers by the front door.

Most of the time, Peck types are not racing to save a guy from the chair or get a kid to OR. Mostly they’re trolling around looking for good deeds to do or taking the family up to the lake for a little quality cocooning time. The TE is ideally suited to such Peck-style, low-pulse-rate cruising. Of course, a Lot of cheaper wagons, and minivans, do an equally competent job of hauling people and yard toys at trolling speeds. For $47,730, you could buy a matched set of Voyagers and have enough money left over to build that rec room at the old folks’ home.

If we had more money than God, we’d probably buy one of these panzerwagens and be rightly proud of owning it. To tell you the truth, though, if Gregory Peck were buying a wagon, he’d probably choose an appliance-white Buick with blue vinyl bench seats, a wood-grain exterior, and the optional tow hitch. Now that would be sensible.

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com