Buying a 1680 IAA 2001 Mercedes S600 - Does it run PT1

Okay, so I heard what all of you said. The majority of you said to stay away from this 2001 Mercedes-Benz S600. I'm nervous as hell right now. Like I'm very nervous because I just bought the damn thing for $1,680. Here it is. This is from IAA. This was donated to charity. So the money does go to charity, which is good. That makes me feel better. We don't know the mileage. We don't know really anything about it at all. But I do know this, and don't mind the mess. I really need to organize my office space here. It's getting a little cluttered. But here's what we do know. We have a car fax that shows it's never been in an accident. No damage ever reported. Six owners. 43 service records. 111,000 miles was the last reported mileage. Now I could go through all these pages with you and take up a lot of your time. Maybe we'll do that later. But for now, I'm going to tell you some of the important things about this car. The main things I want to point out is it has been serviced by the dealership its entire life. Last reported mileage was 111,000 miles, and that was about a year and a half ago if I remember correctly. Throughout this car's life, at about 70,000 miles, it had the head gaskets replaced, and that is a huge deal on this V12. If the head gaskets got replaced, pretty much everything from the head gaskets up got replaced. Not necessarily the heads themselves, but all the gaskets, all of the sealing surfaces, all the little tiny plastic pieces that tend to get brittle and break. This was done professionally at the dealer. So that means all of that stuff has been fixed, and it was due to an oil leak, which is a common problem on this 6.0 liter V12. I did a lot of research into this. That oil leak usually requires removing the heads and the head gas. So that was already done. The transmission fluid was flushed recently. It's had so much regular and preventative maintenance, it is ridiculous. I mean, I wouldn't have been on this car if I hadn't seen the CarPax report that showed that it had such significant work done to it. So honestly, it could be a dud, but I fully expect we're going to get there, figure out how to get that hood open, we're going to fire it up, we're going to put tags on it, and drive it home. That's what I expect. Now, that may not be how it goes, but I expect that this is going to be one of those rare cars that you just get a good deal on because you took a risk. I got a good feeling about it. So I guess let's head to Tulsa, which is about, well, first I got to head to the bank and get a cashier's check for $1680. Then we got to head to Tulsa and see if we can get it running. I'm nervous. I'm really nervous because this thing could end up being a paperweight. Now, regardless, here's the good part. Regardless of whether it's a paperweight or not, we own an S600 V12 Benz that if I wanted to, I can go to my bank right now and that $1680 I just paid for, I could go to my bank and borrow five grand on it today. Give me 30 minutes, I'll have $5,000 cash in my hands. So it's not really a big deal. The car is still worth money to my bank, and if necessary, we can use that money to fix it. Now, the transmission, I had somebody comment and say, those things are known for puking transmissions and they are not replaceable. Well, not that they're not replaceable, but you can't get one. You can't find a used one and you cannot get them rebuilt. And that was actually incorrect. I jumped on eBay and LKQ has plenty of them. You can get them for $500 for a guaranteed good transmission with a warranty. Used, but still, a guaranteed good transmission with a warranty. So 500 bucks isn't bad. So even if we need a tranny and we need to pay somebody to put it in because it's probably more work than I can handle, we should still easily be under what we could sell this car for. I think if this car is as nice as it appears, this is going to probably be a $4,000 to $5,000 car. At least that's my opinion. Let me stop talking and let's go figure out what's going to happen. Do we have to have it towed home? Are we even going to be able to get the hood open? If we do get it open, is it going to start? God, I don't know. Let's just get out of here. All right. We've got booster pack one. We've got another booster pack hidden under there, a box full of tools here, a bag full of tools and zip ties because you always need zip ties, jumper cables, an extra GoPro battery, and last but not least, the trusty old X-Priv. Let's do this. Oh, yeah. So GPS has us taking the back roads for the next, I don't know, few miles. We've got about an hour and a half drive ahead of us. I love these back roads. I figured I'm not going to waste a lot of your time with, you know, driving scenery because I'm sure you're more interested in getting to the car and seeing what's going on. But we're at a stop sign here and I figured let's just give it a little gas, have a little fun. Wow. All right. So I wasn't going to bore you with all the details of this trip, but so far the road, yeah, Hogback Road. We are on Hogback Road. I'm in a Corvette that's since like three inches off the concrete on a road called Hogback. The GPS didn't know there was a detour, road closed, and now we've been driving on some really crappy back roads with potholes. I just want to go get to Tulsa and pick up my new car, you know what I mean? Looky here, ladies and gentlemen, Google finally found its way to the highway. We can finally go get us a car. This is only my second time coming to IAA. Last time I was here I picked up that black Chevy Silverado pickup truck that I lost several thousands of dollars on. And we're here. All right. So we got the title. Everything is good. They told us to pull back here into this like loading lot. It's my first time at the Tulsa IAA. I want to give a big shout out to the staff here. They were very friendly, very helpful, really nice people. It's not always that way at all auctions, so very, very cool. We're just going to pull in here. So we're just going to wait here until they bring out the Mercedes, and then we'll see if we can figure out how to pop that hood and hope that it starts with a jump. And here comes the Benz right in front of us. Looks like they're going to put it right here next to the Corvette. There she is, V12. Let's have a look. All right. So here's the first look at the 2001 S600. Oh, looks like we've got some serious suspension issue going on over here. Did not see that. Hopefully it's some kind of an air ride that will pick itself back up. Again, it was just picked up in the air too, so it's possible. Is this an AMG? This has AMG wheels on it. Right there, AMG wheels. Huh. The hood is definitely stuck on one side. Tim, I need you to go in there and pull the hood latch. See, it's actually low on this entire side, so I'm betting it's because they picked it up on that thing and it's unlevel. See if we can find the hood latch right here. Go lift that hood up if you would. Let's see if it opens like this. There we go. Well, there's a hood latch that you got to release right here. You got to pull it. There you go. It said that the hood was stuck so they couldn't open. Oh, it looks like it's been parked for a while. It's got peanuts and rat's nests all over it. It doesn't feel like it has any water in it at all. Completely empty. This is not a good sign. I guess the next step is we got to find the battery and see if we can jump start it just to see what happens. I'm thinking this isn't going to drive home. Oh, you know what? No, this is for coolant. I thought maybe this was for air, but that's definitely for coolant. It looks like we've got coolant in the reservoir right here. Yeah, we do. It's full of coolant. Interesting. Okay, battery is in the trunk is what it says. Oh, this will be fun. Okay, this is a pain. I've got two booster packs hooked up to it. We've got the key. She fired right up. Oh, we got a lot of lights. SRS, brake light. Does it go into gear? It does. Parking brake was on. Active body control. Drive carefully. Interesting. So she's on. I wonder if the AC works. I don't even know how to work all this. Okay, for now it runs. We got to figure this out. All right. We've got ESP, ABC, sport, parking, all kinds of crap over here. It runs. Let's just go with that for now. All right. So something interesting happened. It's still running. We've been sitting here letting it run. We've been here about a half an hour. But if you remember, the car was sunk down on one side and raised up on the other. And out of nowhere, the car seems to have leveled itself out. I thought for sure we had suspension damage. You know, something wrong with the suspension, but it seems to be okay. So it runs. It's been running about a half hour. It's not overheating. Air conditioning is nice and cold. We're going to go put tags on it. And then we're going to see if we can drive it home. But if you want to find out if it makes the trip home or not, you're going to tune in tomorrow because that's it for this video, guys. I appreciate you taking the time to watch. If you enjoyed this content, give this video a big thumbs up. If you like the cliffhangers, give it a big thumbs up. If you don't like the cliffhangers, give it a big thumbs up anyway. Big thanks to my brother, Tim. That does not go to this car. Thanks to my brother, Tim. Without him, this wouldn't even be possible today. This is exciting. We got ourselves a V12 Mercedes Benz and it runs. Now we have to find out if it drives. I'm excited. I'm really excited. All right. Stay safe out there, everybody. I'll catch you soon, which means tomorrow, in the follow up video to tell you whether this car made it home or not. Talk to you guys soon.