Merc-benz CL Buying Guide
Shop smart and follow expert advice to bag this luxury cruiser.
There’s no shortage of cars that cost plenty when new but that are now available for buttons; the problem is that in many cases running costs can be high for these cars. Take the Mercedes-benz C215 CL; vastly expensive and very exclusive when new, you can now buy one for £3000. But buy badly and it could cost you thousands. Effectively a two-door coupé version of the Mercedes S-class (W220), while the four-door saloon was offered with six-cylinder petrol and diesel engines and started about £40,000, the CL came with V8 or V12 petrols priced from over £70,000. No wonder relatively few were sold, but here’s how to buy a really good one without spending a fortune.
Which one?
All CLS are luxurious, fast and beautifully built, and even the entry-level CL500 packs 302bhp. They’re loaded with kit so it’s better to find a mollycoddled CL500 without extras than a fully loaded, neglected CL600, because the latter will be financially painful.
Early CL55S were naturally aspirated; a supercharger was fitted from late 2002 and are the most sought after. However, the 2000 CL55 AMG F1 was a naturally-aspirated special edition. Just 55 were made. All are left-hand drive and have ceramic brakes, and crop up occasionally. The CL63 AMG and CL65 AMG are the real collectors’ pieces. Just 26 of the former were made, some RHD, but they rarely come up for sale. Meanwhile just 37 RHD CL65 AMGS were made and each year one or two come onto the market. A minter is worth only around 20 per cent of the original list price.
Mercedes guru Michael Longley says: ‘I worked at a Mercedes dealer when these were new; we saw loads of CL500S, a few CL55S, but very few CL600S. It’s hard to find anybody who is familiar enough with either of the V12 engines to be considered a specialist.
‘On an M275 V12 engine simple jobs like coolant change or removing almost any component requires interfering with the liquid-cooled intercooler system which is a nightmare to bleed. You have to want a V12. You’ll struggle to find someone to fix it should something obscure go wrong, you won’t find used bits and they aren’t much quicker than the V8.’
Whatever you buy make sure it’s been lavished with cash; many are owned by people who can’t afford to run them. Maintenance is for an expert, so it’s likely it’s someone outside the main dealer network; many technicians who worked on these cars when new are now running their own workshops.
Bodywork
Very little of the CL’S bodywork is steel, so rust isn’t an issue. Only the inner wings, floorpans and bulkhead are steel and they’re well rust-proofed. Most of the outer panels are aluminium, including the bonnet, roof and door skins while the bootlid and front wings are plastic; the door shells are magnesium. Paint adheres well to these and while some aluminium panels can
dent easily, that isn’t a huge issue with the CL.
Mercedes-benz Club CL Register Captain, Clive Henderson, comments: ‘What can be a problem is minor electrolytic corrosion where two different metals meet. This includes rear wheelarches, bottom of the C-pillar and the door skin edges, but it’s a question of cleaning things and retouching the paint; it won’t get to the point where the metal has big holes in it like steel does if it’s left to fester.’ CLS had a glass sunroof but electric mechanism failure or water ingress isn’t a very
common problem.
Oily bits
All CL engines are tough if maintained properly, but the ancillaries can give problems, especially the twin-turbo V12s because of the heat generated. Coil packs can fail, usually when spark plugs are replaced; the M113 had individual coil packs per cylinder, but the M137 and M275 V12s got one pack per bank with replacements