VRROOM WITH A VIEW: The greenest car is one you do not have to replace
THE other day I needed a lift to an event that was likely to involve wine and, with my cellphone smashed to smithereens this meant hailing a taxi in the old-fashioned way instead of firing up the Uber app. So I wandered out of my flat and on to the street, where I found young Themba resting behind the wheel of his taxi. It was an elderly Mercedes-Benz 230E and had more than 466,000km on the clock. This, for reasons that I will explain, had me in mind of a lobster.I’ve been thinking a lot about that generation of Mercedes-Benz, known to Benz anoraks as the W123.They were manufactured between 1976 and 1985. There are two reasons you continue to see them absolutely everywhere.One is that it remains the most popular model Mercedes-Benz — 2.7-million units were sold, more than 77,000 of which were built in East London.The other reason they’re still everywhere is that they are, I increasingly believe, the pinnacle of automotive engineering to date.They enjoy what biologists call "negligib...
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