Hi!

We took the "whales" out of winter hibernation,

I will say a couple of things about every one of them now,

And after that I'll review one of them. It is going to be the car that has been with me for more than a decade and I have the most memories with.

This is an S600 that was imported from Spain,

It is barely just a facelifted model, and by that I mean the car was manufactured in the life cycle impulse transition,

It has the new style bumpers, it's got the sunroof, the doorcards are also the new versions,

However it still has the little reverse rods, we can also call them reversing aid as well.

And it also has the newer, coil on plug style ignition M120 engine in it.

By the way this car is waiting for a smaller renovation, we might make a video series about that.

It only has smaller issues, such as the wood trim being burnt by the sun at a couple spots due to it being a Spanish car,

It only has minor things to do, apart from them it is a great little car.

This next one is an S320, poverty spec, base model,

So much that it came with a manual transmission from factory, which is very rare for W140s.

Cloth seats, they were the cheapest option. The only extra it has is air conditioning and literally nothing else apart from that.

This is very early year car, I think either from 1991 or 92. It will soon become eligible for becoming an old timer.

It is in great condition, it has a great suspension,

It is a well sorted car all around, it's a unique rarity.

Moving on, this is one of my favorites, the exact opposite of this S320,

It is a 600SEL Lorinser, if I remember correctly it was imported from Japan,

And apart from a couple things it has been spec'd with every single thing Mercedes has offered back then.

What it doesn't have is the motorized table in the back that would fold down from the passenger seat,

And also, the rear bench is not split up. But it's more of a preference than an upgrade question.

However it has a champagne fridge at the back seats, what it also has is a pretty rare and unique extra, the leather wrapped dashboard with stitching,

And pretty much all the electronics that manufacturers could do back then.

This next one is a coupe,

It's the only 2 door in our collection,

An S500, still a pre-facelift model.

Moderately spec'd, the whole interior is blue leather,

But it also has soft close doors, Bose sound system, etc...

It is a great car, needs a detailing,

But apart from that this is ready and finished.

Then here is the main car of the video, the S600 Drift Taxi, we'll get back to this later.

This next one is also an S320, "The SUV", I think it's been at least 6-7 years since we converted it to look like this.

Basically what we've done is to put a manual trans in it, put S600 stock springs in it which made it sit this high on their own!

It has a welded diff, this bull bar, mirror protectors, and that's all!

Onto the last car in the line, this is a S420,

We initially bought it to break for parts, but then we cut the roof off for fun, to see how it would look.

I even drove it on the streets for a couple weeks on dealer plates. Awesome feeling!

Sadly ever since it's just been put away and we haven't done anything with it,

It isn't really finished, where the pillars have been cut, it is pretty rough, so it's not looking great aesthetically...

But at least we've made it.

Was it good?

Yeah!

As usual, let's look at a carVertical report, this time about an S-Classe, since we're surrounded by them anyways.

Here it shows that vehicle has been damaged before,

It was first registered in the United States in 2017,

Then it went to Poland in early 2020,

And then from there it came to Hungary in 02.2022.

Here it was taken to a technical inspection.

Let's take a look at the damage.

It lists two incidents,

The first one in 02.2019, where the rear end got damaged,

The other one in 01.2020, this time both the rear and front end got smashed.

And here are the photos, it got its rear brutally destroyed,

It's unbelievable that they can recover a car from such state!

And two years later you can see the car here in an immaculate condition,

Nonetheless you cannot see from the pictures that this car been smashed from behind previously.

If you want to check your current, or desired car, use the link in the description to get a 20% discount.

We started building this car in 2010,

Here’s how the idea came: I was using W124s to go to these like amateur rally and rallysprint events held on airports,

They had M104 engines, quite a lot of them gave up and they weren't powerful enough.

We had been breaking W140s like this regularly at that time and we figured why not convert an S600 into a racecar.

We started taking one apart, we gutted the interior basically, we put in a cage and a pair of bucket seats.

Then came the question of transmission as the S600 has only ever been made with an auto trans.

There have been no manual gearbox solutions beforehand,

After lots of thinking we ended up squeezing in a BMW gearbox, a 6-speed box out of a diesel E60 530D,

In a way that we cut off its original bell housing and welded it together with a bell housing taken from an original S600 automatic transmission.

We got a fully custom flywheel and clutch made for it and it all came together nicely. We also had to cut and modify the drive shaft to fit.

The drivetrain pretty much was done with these, the rear diff is factory W140, maybe it's a bit shorter than the original S600 one,

I think the original one was 2.6:1 and this one is around 3.07:1, so it is not a lot shorter in ratios.

The diff is welded, but the axles and all the rest are stock.

The steering angle is also unmodified, W140s and these older Mercs are pretty famous for their good steering angles,

Obviously not as good as a drift car's, but still respectable for a standard car!

Another question was the electronics, it wasn't typical in Hungary to use VEMS, MaxxECU (it probably didn't even exist yet) at this level when we built the car,

So we retained the factory ECU. The car now works thinking it is in neutral constantly,

This only has one downside, in first gear when launching, it cuts out at around 4500RPM,

Because the auto trans doesn't let you rev out the engine to 6000RPM when in park or neutral to save it from any damage.

So every time I launch in first gear, it cuts out at 4500RPM for the first couple times and then it lets me rev up to 6000,

The issue doesn't exist in second and and higher gears.

The only modification done to the engine is that it gets a little bit more fuel.

We achieved this while retaining the OEM ECU, someone tweaked it for us, we haven't done anything else to it.

This is still a pre-facelift model, so it doesn't have coil on plug style ignition, but we don't even need it.

It still has the same unopened engine that is was originally manufactured with,

So this is an almost 30 years old V12, that I've been bashing the limiter in for over 10 years,

And it has no issues to this day, it never had any problems ever.

These engines have a typical failure where the loom burns to a crisp and everything melts in the engine bay,

However we never had any of these issues, even though we used it on airports in 40+C (105+F), and put it through its paces,

It is incredible that it handles all of that. The whole engine is covered in oil sludge, you can barely see the engine block anymore.

I am sure it has oil leaks everywhere, so in the near future we plan to take the engine out and go over it.

It will be interesting to open it up and see how a 30 years old V12 looks on the inside.

We recently revised the engine of the C600, we replaced the seals on it,

We couldn't really see any wear on the inside of that one, I am excited to see how this one is going to look.

When we get to doing this one, there is going to be a video about that for sure, so be sure to subscribe to not miss that one!

So we started using this car in 2010-11, we mostly took it to gymkhana events, we then also entered the Professional Hungarian Drift Championship as well,

We attended it for a few seasons, but it turned out very fast that the car is unusably heavy, around 1700kgs (3750lbs), which is brutal.

We were able to achieve decent success in gymkhana races using Ferrari Challenge slick tires, I might have even won a championship with it.

The car stood up to the task surprisingly well there, unlike in drifting, that's why we started the C600 project to replace this.

After finishing the C600, this car was parked in the garage without much use.

After a few years an idea came, since it's such a big car, why not replace the rear section of the roll cage with another 2 bucket seats,

And make Hungary's or maybe even Europe's first drift taxi.

So we just started doing it, we cut out sections of the cage, modified it so that two more race seats would fit and we ended up with a very comfortable drift taxi.

We've been using it like this for 4 years, during an AMTS (international car and tuning show) I can take up to 100 passengers with it and it just does without skipping a beat.

The only problem we have with it is that the accessory belt sometimes snaps.

This is because of the missing AC compressor, we didn't need is so far, but now I would put it back to be honest, to not rot into our clothes while drifting.

And by removing a pulley caused the belt to go on a different route, and sometimes a movement can form that ends with the belt snapping. That's all.

We keep replacing it and the car is ready to use again, apart from that the car needs no service.

We keep using it, occasionally replacing the oil when we don't forget to and we do nothing else to it.

This ride is also far from being retired, I have plans for it, but at the moment we have so many ongoing projects that this car is down on the priority list.

We just have use this one for now. And it is pretty rare when one can "only just use" a car like this.

Thank you for watching, I'll see you next at latest and until then, bye!