Shed of the Week | Mercedes-Benz S320

A classic Mercedes S-Class can still be bought for Shed money. Why wouldn't you?

By Tony Middlehurst / Friday, 13 March 2026 / Loading comments

Fear plays a large part in the purchase of any used car. This week's offering, a W220 Mercedes S320, might generate more fear than most, but there again when you're only risking £1,990 on it, how bad can it be?

Let's begin by remembering how good a gen-four W220 S320 was when it was new in 2002. The W220 had actually come out four years before in 1998 as the successor to the tanklike W140, a car so over-engineered that even over-engineers thought it was over-engineered. The Bruno Sacco designed W220 took a step back from that. Unsurprisingly it was physically smaller and lighter than its dad - it could hardly be otherwise - but it still had more interior space than the W140. It also had new features like Airmatic pneumatic suspension and, in '03MY cars that came after our Shed, Pre-Safe, the world's first pre-emptive collision warning safety system.

Our Feb '02, 144,000-mile Shed has the growly but smooth 220hp 3.2 litre V6 petrol engine giving it a top speed of 149mph, a 0-60 time of 7.9sec, an average fuel consumption figure of 24mpg and an annual tax liability of £430, maybe. The vendor says that it has a clear vehicle history check, which is good. They also say that as a 2002 model it represents a classic era of Mercedes-Benz engineering. You'll find a few who might argue about that. Cost-cutting had become the new mantra at Mercedes at the turn of the century after the ruinously expensive to produce W140. The effects of that new policy combined with sackfuls of electronic gadgetry knackering the battery soon had disgruntled owners jamming up M-B's customer service switchboards.

Airmatic was particularly troublesome, especially on pre-'03 cars like this one which suffered from issues like leaky top strut seals and failing high-pressure lines to the valve bodies. Not all W220s had Airmatic, mind. Shed thinks that cars with the 487 option of Active Body Control wouldn't have had it, but you'll never get him to sign any statement to that effect. Plus ABC had pumps and pipes problems all of its own.

There's no mention of Airmatic in this ad, but given the system's bad rep that might be a tactical omission. Annoyingly there are no interior shots, just a mysterious mention of cream leathers and a request that interested parties should call to verify the information in the ad, but let's take the charitable view that the inside is on a par with the outside and therefore OK. That would be Shed's experience of these cars. Rust is also Shed's experience of early W220s but a quick squint through the MOT history of this one reveals no mention of the c-word anywhere. Last week's MOT test produced zero advisories.

The paint on this apparently solid car is interesting. Shed first thought it might be Bernstein Red, named after the colour of the renowned conductor Leonard Bernstein's face when he was having an argument with a feisty bassoonist. After mulling it over with a large glass of fake Jack Daniels, however, Shed has changed his guess to Bourbon Metallic, which by coincidence also describes the taste of his knockoff JD. For the sake of balance it's fair to say that if you compared M-B to an enormous bungee jumper they were on the way back up in 2002 having properly bashed their head on the stony canyon floor of customer dissatisfaction a couple of years earlier. You could also say that any car coming after the W140 was always riding for a fall on the quality front, and that in isolation the W220 was a perfectly decent car.

American consumer organisations certainly revised their negative ratings of the W220 upwards as the 2000s wore on, most noticeably on post-facelift cars. This car isn't one of those but Shed still has a pleasant warm feeling in his trousers about it, rather than the usual slightly less pleasant one. Which reminds him, if you do buy this car you might want to invest in a trickle charger to keep the battery in good shape.

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