The buyer of a cheesy Mercedes lost his pants in a year and a half of ownership, each kilometer cost him over 374 CZK

Just imagine – you leave the house, travel 10 km, CZK 3,740 is gone and will never come back. There are cars that you can probably put up with if you can afford it, but in this case it doesn’t seem like a good deal to us.

Mercedes are cars for carousels, they say. It’s a cliché like all similar statements, just like in other cases, but here too it’s true that it didn’t come out of nowhere. “Worldly” people who put up with cheesy symbols of social status usually gravitate towards Mercedes the most out of all German prestigious brands, so it is not surprising that it is the three-pointed star that successfully offers cars like the one in the photos below.

In this particular specification, it is still on the ground, but otherwise it is a Mercedes-Maybach GLS, which can take on such cheesy forms that it is too much even for the Russians. It is a truly strikingly opulent symbol of wealth, whose image necessarily comes with a price that no normal person can afford to pay, because then they would want it too, wouldn’t they? The car you are looking at came to its buyer in November 2022, when it was purchased, for 342,841 Euros. And not the list prices, we are talking about the figure on the invoice that he had to pay, because it is a Dutch car, where due to extreme taxation, the real prices of cars are entered into public databases to prevent tax evasion.

So it’s a machine for 8.6 million CZK, it’s really not a car for everyone. By Mercedes standards, the choice of the top version of the GLS 600 with a twice-turbocharged eight-cylinder engine of 557 horsepower combined with the maximum of available extras created a brutal price tag. And their prices are sometimes so fat that they send the figure on the final price tag of the car by millions and millions more like nothing. Why not if you can, right? But in the case of a similarly disproportionately expensive and opulent Mercedes, you have to accept that you are buying it for yourself and you have to really love it, because no one else will buy it for a comparable amount.

The owner of this car is convinced of this to his heart’s content, as he sends the car further into the world. He owned it for a year and a half and drove it 6,253 km, creating one of the kings of relative depreciation. The current offer price of the car is still high, EUR 249,500 means about CZK 6.25 million. But it is also CZK 2,340,000 less than what this car actually cost when new. That’s a lot, but if we convert it into kilometers driven, each one cost the owner over 374 CZK just for the loss of value – without gasoline or anything else.

This is another brutality of its kind, but imagine the economy of traffic: Prague-Brno? No problem, maximum luxury guaranteed. Price? CZK 74,800 for the trip there. And 74,800 for the return trip, without refueling or lunch, simply through the lens of the price of the “iron”, i.e. the car itself. Brno will really have to be a golden ship for you to make such a trip worthwhile. And it is still true that the car will have to be sold for those 6.25 million crowns, which we dare to doubt a little. It’s still not a bargain, and for the second and subsequent owners, driving this car will be an extremely expensive spree. How many people can afford something like that? And at the same time, he has no problem buying a used car? That will be a very, very small set…

You are looking at one of the historical kings of the loss of value, the price of 374 CZK/km only through this lens is the extreme of its kind. Photo: Thomas den Houdijker, published with permission

Source T. den Houdijker@Marktplaats

Peter Miller

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