This Mercedes E55 AMG Is Absurdly Cheap At Under £9K

This week, we were pretty stunned to see a YouTuber’s 402,000 mile W211 Mercedes E55 almost hit its factory horsepower figure on the dyno, and actually exceed its original torque figure. It shows that even the leggiest of these supercharged E55s are mighty fast, and - naturally - this led to a little trip to the classifieds.

To our surprise, we found an example being sold for a borderline absurd £8495. If you were thinking it must have some galactic mileage figure, you’d be wrong: it has a reasonably modest 107,000 miles on the clock. It’s not like it’s tatty, either: from the pictures at least, it looks to be in remarkable condition for a 13-year-old car.

At around £2000 less than the next cheapest ‘E55k’ it’s almost suspiciously cheap, but assuming everything checks out, this represents a hell of a lot of car for not much money.

The 5.4-litre, supercharged version of Mercedes’ M113 V8 made its way into various mid-noughties AMG products, producing a whopping 574bhp and 590lb ft in the limited-run CLK DTM. In the E55 it’s good for a still very potent 469bhp and 516lb ft - that’s a greater allotment of torque than its 6.2-litre N/A replacement managed, by the way.

0-62mph happens in 4.7 seconds, which sounds awfully pedestrian when the current E63 S does the same in just 3.4 seconds, but we are talking about a car that costs just a tenth of AMG’s current bruiser-spec E-Class. Come to think of it, there can’t be many other standard cars under £10,000 that can break the five second barrier.

The E55k is a car that came long before AMG found the ability to create a proper dynamic rival for the BMW M5, but if you’re looking for something fast, understated and comfortable that rocks an awesome soundtrack, this thing is hard to beat.

Of course, we now have to point out that while a used E55 will be cheap to buy, it most certainly won’t be cheap to run. It’ll run on a heavy diet of unleaded, won’t be cheap to service, and as with a lot of Mercedes of the era, it’ll be prone to the odd electrical issue. Rust problems aren’t unheard of, either.

Even bearing all that in mind, this is a seriously tempting used buy. Anyone want to take the plunge?