In mid 2009 I went car shopping for a Toyota Camry to replace my Mitsubishi Magna. After a day of viewing many examples at a variety of dealerships, I had a brain explosion and paid a deposit on this 2001 Mercedes CLK 230 Kompressor. With a wife and three young children, why wouldn't I buy such an impractical 2 door, 4 seater car?
Truth is, I'd admired this particular model for many years, and my wife had a car that acted as the 'family car', so it was time to indulge.
For a 2001 model car, I was quite happy with some of the features and technology. Apart from the basics like power windows and mirrors, it also had powered seats, a 6 stack CD player, rain sensing wipers, heated exterior mirrors, remote window opening and closing (hold down the 'lock' button on the key fob), and a few other features that made owning the car quite pleasurable, and certainly a step up from my Magna.
With a 2.3 litre supercharged engine, power output was about 145kw by memory with zero to 100kph in around 8.5 seconds. It was by no means an overly powerful engine, but it got along fast enough for me. I'm not a racer nor do I pretend to be. Fuel economy was very poor though, and averaged around 13 litres / 100 kms in the city. This didn't bother me too much, as I only drove around 6,000kms a year during my time with it.
The handling was fine. However, the ride could be quite choppy on roads that weren't smooth. I believe the Avantgarde had quite stiff springs compared to the Elegance version. I must admit, the choppiness got a bit tiring after a while. However, where the car really shone was on the freeway. It hunkered down, and just felt so at home driving at speed on a smooth wide road where it was ultimately designed to be driven.
Servicing costs, at my local independent mechanic, were reasonable and comparable to any other mainstream car of a similar age.
Reliability, or lack thereof, and the associated repair costs were top of my mind when I bought this car as there are a lot of horror stories about buying second hand European cars. However, I think bad news travels faster and farther than good news. During the seven years that I owned the car, there were four issues that I had to deal with. Luckily, they were quite minor in nature and I was able to fix them all of them apart from one which I learned to live with. For those I did fix, it was a fairly simple case of consulting a few forums, and buying some parts from both an overseas supplier and a single genuine part from my local Benz dealer. All up, the cost of parts was not much more than a few hundred dollars. So if you are thinking of buying a car like this, don't despair as my mechanical skills are fairly non-existent. Taking it to a dealer though would have been a completely different financial proposition.
The issue that I didn't bother fixing, or getting fixed, was related to the parking sensors. For some reason, on quite warm days, they'd malfunction and loudly and continuously beep, and so I had to turn them off (there is a button for this). I have no idea what the actual problem was, and as it occurred relatively infrequently, I just lived with it.
Last year I decided to sell the car and move on to something new. At 16 years old and with 150,000 kms on the clock, I had a gut feel that it was time to move on before any major work was required. I'd had a great run with the car, and was happy to have sold it to an enthusiast.