Mercedes E-Class 'Beerbuster' | Shed of the Week

Who you gonna call?

By Tony Middlehurst / Friday, 22 December 2023 / Loading comments

Shed doesn’t get many presents at Christmas. Mrs Shed normally gives him a woolly bobble hat, not so much to keep his head warm but to deaden the incriminating ringing sound when her frying pan comes into contact with his skull. He’s hoping he might get something from the postmistress, maybe a new Twister game to replace their worn-out one, but that would normally be it as far as his gift expectations go.

So you can imagine the cheery grin on his mush when he bumped into this week’s Shed while sifting through the 1,700-odd sub-£2,000Sshed-qualifying cars on PH Classifieds. He was planning on giving you the cheapest MOT’d runner on there as a humble, Christmassy fable-type offering (for those interested, it would have been a £590 Fiesta 1.2) but just as he was getting near the end of his trawl the creation you are goggling at right now popped up on his screen. It’s as if Santa himself has delivered the ultimate Christmas motor for his, and hopefully your, delectation and delight. Behold the Beerbuster!

The pics aren’t great, so it’s hard to work out the process, but we’re told that the spec includes a roll-out beer garden which is surely one of the motor industry’s biggest missed opportunities. Shed can see a couple of seats in the back that look tailor-made for relaxed quaffing and there seems to be enough longitudinal space between the snug and the steering wheel to allow the designated driver to go about his or her business without inhaling too many intoxicating fumes.

The Beerbuster would have started off as a late-1996 Mercedes W210 hearse, powered here by the non-turbo E250 diesel. Powered isn’t really the right word though. The E250 wasn’t a four-pot but a more exciting-sounding inline-five, but it still wasn’t what you’d call sporty. In naturally aspirated format it ground out a suitably funereal 111hp at a much less funereal 5,000rpm and an equally meek 130lb ft at 3,200rpm. In the saloon, this provided a 0-62mph time of 15.3sec. In a fully-loaded hearse you would probably be looking at nearer 20sec. Of course, speed was not a prerequisite or even particularly desirable for a hearse, but if you did want to hypothetically hurry along to the wake the turbocharged version E250 would have got you there quite a lot sooner, hurtling through the 0-62 in a rear-window-smashing 10.4sec courtesy of its 150hp and 210lb ft.

The good thing about vehicles that have been prepared for charity runs – in this case the highly appropriate and very worthwhile BEN charity which looks after those who have worked in the auto business – is that they have been prepared for charity runs. That generally means they’ll be in decent fettle, even when they’re the notoriously rust-prone W210. Hearses didn’t have a hard life and this one would have been mollycoddled when not in use so it had probably largely escaped tinworm attack when it was picked out for beery duties. Any dodgy bits will almost certainly have been replaced with new, admittedly maybe sourced from the loft space of a Mancunian garage rather than Benz’s classic parts department, but the fact is that this vehicle has a valid MOT certificate running to next September (’24) with just one minor defect noted for windscreen damage and one advisory for a slightly smeary wiper, which is far from unusual on single-wiper Mercs.

Shed hasn’t been able to find out where the ‘SIL’ registration number comes from. Doubtless someone on here will be able to enlighten us. What Shed does know however is that the number is only 8,744 off being worth £55,000, that being the current asking price for SIL 1.

In case you were wondering, there’s no Shed of the Year this year as Shed is still road-testing in the back of the Beerbuster, but before things got properly messy we did manage to get him to tell us the top five most popular ones for 2023. They’re in no particular order because Shed was in no particular order at the time of asking. So, there was the £1,500 L322 Range Rover 2.9 diesel from January, the blue Mazda MX-5 NC at £1,895 in February, the graphite grey BMW E65 730d at £1,995 from October, the minty fresh 3.0 V6 Mondeo Ghia at £1,995, also from October and the Audi B7 A4 Avant 2.0 TFSI S-Line whose price Shed forgot to include in his story but which he thinks was £1,995 in September.

Okay, so it turns out that that actually was the right order, with the L322 first and the Avant fifth. Just out of idle curiosity, Shed looked up the MOT status of these five as of December 2023. The Mondeo, Avant and 730d were all freshly MOT’d at the time of sale, so are presumably still happily bumbling about. The MX-5’s ticket expired in March, one month after Shed featured it, and the L322 failed to turn up for its test in October. Hmm, where’s that underseal?

Compliments of the season to you all from Mrs Shed, her children Potting and Garden, the postmistress, Bob the binman and, from somewhere not quite beyond the grave but not far off it, Shed.

See the full ad