Shed of the Week | Mercedes E320 CDI (W211)

If you’re one of the eight people on the planet who haven’t seen Star Wars, this week’s Shed is Luke Skywalker’s T-65B X-wing Starfighter. Oh all right then, it’s actually a 2006 Mercedes W211 E320 CDI Sport, a charity auction item for St Helena, which Shed thinks is a hospice in Essex. That tallies with the dealer’s location in Manningtree. 

This is where earthly geography ends because this car is from another dimension, one possibly fuelled by lager. Many of your favourite characters are here, including C-3PO, who despite having had his bottom half sliced off by an Empire TIE fighter laser cannon shot looks cheerful enough on the roof. He shares this area with a binlike R2D2, a Mercedes radio antenna, and a secondary aerial that has unfortunately entered his metal nut via the right earhole. 

Like the TIE, the X-wing had laser cannons, plus two proton torpedo launchers. Our Shed’s armament consists of a motorhome power inverter, four painted plastic bottles on the wingtips and what looks like a paint roller in the cleft of the X. Lurking in the cabin footwell for show-only deployment is a VAD5R reg plate. To save you the bother of looking, that number hasn’t been allocated to an actual car. Nor has VAD55R or, for the really desperate Star Wars fans, VAD555R. Shame, either of the first two would have looked great on a black AMG with a 6.2 motor. 

The creators have gone to a fair amount of bother on the detailing, up to and including underfloor lighting and X-wing style battle stains on the bodywork. At the risk of inviting scorn from the Mr Logics on here, can anybody enlighten Shed as to where all that dirt on X-wing fighters was supposed to have come from? As far as Shed is aware, which admittedly isn’t very far, there is no dirt in space. There is cosmic dust, but that’s more like smoke than dust. Even if there was actual dust you can’t imagine it adhering that well in the dryness of space to the surface of an X-wing which, with its fusial thrust engines and hyperdrive motivators (we’re not making that up, somebody else did) was capable of accelerating at a dust-busting 3,700g. Against that sort of acceleration the X-wing’s claimed top speed seems surprisingly low at 652mph, but its 0-652mph time must have been well short. 

That’s nothing, though. Darth Vader’s TIE fighter made the X-wing look positively puny in both point-and-squirt acceleration (4,240g) and top speed (776mph). For comparison, a top fuel dragster can generate 5g and an F-16 or F-35 fighter jet up to around 9g. No doubt someone will add more detail in the forum about what sort of protective gear allowed anyone to survive in either of these Star Wars craft. All Shed can say is that Vader must have had a hell of a helmet on him. 

For anyone who is interested, or indeed still alive having got this far, as you can clearly see this is a facelift car. That means it doesn’t have the pre ’06 car’s troublesome Sensotronic Brake Control. It also means that it does have the new-for-2006 and less DIY-friendly 3.0 CDI OM642 V6 diesel with 221hp at 3,800rpm, 376lb ft at 1,600-2,800rpm, a 0-60mph time in the mid-sixes, a limited top speed of 155mph and an annual VED tax liability of £430. In standard trim it averaged 38mpg, but you should perhaps knock a bit off that and off the top speed too bearing in mind the aerodynamics. You might notice a few more interior rattles than normal as well, and opening the boot looks like a challenge.

Even so it’s surely worth buying at £2k or very probably less, not only for the fun of driving it and bringing a smile to kids’ (and quite a few adults’) faces, but also for the pleasure of being able to take it along to your MOT test station next January. The only advisories on this year’s ticket were for a couple of slightly grotty front brake pipes. Cars like this are pretty sound by and large as the folk putting them together tend not to be dodgy types trying to cut corners to save a bob or two. To be serious for a moment Shed has nothing but good words to say about hospices, his brother having recently passed away in one. He thinks that this Star Wars Merc is brilliant and hopes a PHer will purchase it and put it to good use.