Collect Mercedes-Benz cars for nearly twenty years and your garage eventually starts to resemble a dealership, and Austrian enthusiast Hannes Daxecker has decided it is time to shut the showroom. Daxecker runs his family’s coffin manufacturing business, Daxecker Holzindustrie, which he took over in 1995. On 7 November, all 83 cars from what is billed as Europe’s largest private Mercedes collection will be sold, and not one has a reserve price. Essentially whoever bids the highest price takes the car home.
The backbone is the S-Class, which explains the collection’s name, Sammlung Sonderklasse. Daxecker owns twenty-five W 126s, ten W 140s, eight W 116s and a few of the older W 109 and W 112 cars, along with coupes and a 1969 600. That is a near complete family tree of how Mercedes taught the world what a flagship saloon should be, and it suggests a man who collected with a plan.
The highlight is the price tag, or the lack of a scary one. Most of the W 116, W 126 and W 140 sedans open at just $3,500 to $4,500, the 600 at around $34,000, and the 300 SL Roadster tops the list at over $330,000. These are starting bids, though, and a 15 percent buyer premium including VAT sits on top. Of course, the real story will be where the final bid lands. The sweetest comparison is the 450 SEL 6.9, which opens at just over $11,000, while most analysts put good examples near $50,000. Somebody could bag an absolute bargain, or at least get a good story out of trying. Equally charming is a 1990 300 SE in Surf Blue with a manual gearbox and one owner from new, starting at about $4,500.
The oddity is lot 19, a 300 SE 6.3 that Mercedes never actually sold. It was reportedly an experimental company car for Karl Wilfert, who worked with Béla Barényi on passive safety, and it opens at around $22,000. Think of it as a factory hot rod, which for the right collector is worth far more than the number might suggest.
Daxecker is also parting with fifty motorcycles, a 2004 Maybach 62 and roughly 900 lots of automobilia. Viewing runs on 5 and 6 November, and bids can come in person, by phone, in writing or online. A word of caution though. The descriptions come from the Humer Granner auction house without independent inspection reports, and tired air or hydropneumatic suspension on a cheap Mercedes has a way of making the purchase price the smallest bill you will ever pay.
