Mercedes CLK 280 | Shed of the Week

Winter is very much here. So woolly hats on and soft-top off, right?

By Tony Middlehurst / Friday, 28 November 2025 / Loading comments

As the dewdrop on the end of Shed’s warty old hooter indicates, winter is well and truly here, so of course it must be time for a convertible. And here it is, an apparently well-cared-for Mercedes CLK 280 with shiny Obsidian Black paint, a punchy six-pot powertrain, a clean cabin and just one name in the logbook.

The CLK (Coupe Luxus Kurz) was Mercedes’s range of ‘mid-size’ coupes and convertibles. We put mid-size in speech marks there because while it took its styling cues from the E-Class, it was actually built on the smaller C-Class platform. The internal designations were a bit weird, too. The gen-one CLK was the 208. A gen-two like our 2005 example was, as you might expect if you went to school at any point in your life, the 209 - but the 2010-on gen-three weirdly went back to 207.

Shed was never much good at maths either. If you’re like him, apologies because here come some more numbers. There was a 268hp 350 version of the 1,735kg 209 CLK, but the 1,705kg naturally aspirated M272 3.0-litre V6 we’ve got here had more than enough squirt for most with 228hp at a zingy 6,000rpm and 221lb ft at a more accessible 2,500rpm. Those figures gave it a 0-60mph time in the mid-sevens and a top speed of 152mph. Official combined fuel consumption for the 7G-Tronic auto 280 that we got in the UK was 30 and a bit mpg, with 40+ supposedly possible on a gentle run. Some markets could have the 280 with six-speed manual gearbox, but the 350 was auto only. For UK tax purposes, today the CLK 280 sits in the £415 a year bracket.

The gen-two benefited from some good trim and resizing updates that took it away from the cramped old C-Class Sports Coupe and closer to the S-Class-based CL. There was a good deal of extra interior space, the bigger 390-litre boot could easily swallow a bag of golf sticks, the soft-top was re-engineered for less noise and speedier (20 seconds) operation, and its C-pillars were narrower, making reversing easier.

Our shed went in for its most recent MOT test at the beginning of November and came out clean. The only advisories since its first test in 2008 have been for consumable items. The six fails were for an underperforming parking brake, a dodgy exhaust support, an airbag warning light, a loose suspension ball joint, some ‘headlamp product’, and a gashed tyre plus fractured wheel, the damage in both cases being on the non-visible side. Shed reckons that a good percentage of us will at this very moment be blithely driving along with similar problems. Depending on the severity of the damage and the rate of air leakage, invisible wheel and/or tyre damage might only become known at MOT time, which is a good advertisement for the worth of the British MOT test.

The Alpina-style 18-inch multispoke wheels look rather nice even though at least one of them seems to have been shod with a tyre made by sealions. Maybe the owner was forced into it by the shortage of rear tyres in the CLK’s hard-to-find 255/35 size. Anyway, altogether not a bad list of problems considering this car’s near 120k mileage. Although the models powered by the refined and punchy V6 are regarded as the sweet spot in the range by shed hunters, they won’t be rattle-free in 2025. The frameless windows didn’t always sit in the right place, leading to wind noise. On this car there seems to be a small parting of the ways on the right-hand side of the rear screen, a common fault. A complete new hood in mohair will cost you about £1,500 fitted or £600 or so from a scrappers if you’re handy with the spanners. The hood on this car obviously works but the next owner should make a point of checking the hydraulic fluid level in the reservoir behind the carpet on the left side of the boot. If it’s low there’s a leak somewhere. There are about a dozen microswitches that can go wrong, too.

The electrics in general needed monitoring, particularly over-zealous sensors, too-keen seatbelt presenters and failing air con stepper motors. The infotainment on pre-June ’05 facelift cars (which this one isn’t) was about 10 years behind the times but the 209 CLK spec level was always very good. Keyless entry doorhandles could break, as could the electric seat adjusters and the bootlid brake light lens, letting water into the boot.

Shed also seems to recall a potentially nasty issue with the timing gear and balance shaft on pre-2007 cars, problems with plastic intake manifolds and crankshaft position sensors and something about handbrake cables rubbing on the propshaft housing, but he’s reckoning that a one-owner car like this will have had all the right servicing and recall boxes ticked. The suspension is standard steel without hydraulics or air, which, from a complication point of view, is a good thing. Chassis parts will wear out but replacing them won’t be as expensive as you might think.

Most importantly, the 209 suffered much less from rust issues than the preceding 208. You still need to keep a weather eye out for the rear arches, boot lid and door bottoms on pre-facelift cars, but as mentioned already this isn’t one of those. Looking at it here this seems like an awful lot of car for a fiver under £2k, but then again there are a lot of awful cars at this sort of money in the classifieds, and a disproportionately high number of them are Mercs. Caveat emptor and get your woolly hat out.

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