A shop owner's W123 coupe, no reserve: a 300CD Turbo at $20,000

This 300CD Turbo was delivered new to Wright Motors in Syracuse, New York, in Anthracite Gray Metallic over Palomino MB-Tex with an electric sunroof. Its last owner runs an automotive shop and bought it in 2024, and he did the work a W123 coupe needs to be driven, not just kept.

He overhauled the suspension and brakes, rebuilt the cruise control, fitted a Klima Design Works automatic climate control conversion, and put a Becker cassette stereo with Bluetooth in the dash. It sits on 15-inch BBS wheels, and the original 14-inch Bundt wheels came with the car, along with the window sticker, a maintenance log, the invoices from his ownership and a clean Carfax. It shows 92,000 miles.

Why we went no reserve

This car had been auctioned once before, on another site. It hammered, but the deal never closed, and the owner came to us to get it done. A car coming back after a failed sale carries a question mark, and bidders price that in. The fastest way to remove it is to go no reserve: it tells everyone the car is selling, period, to whoever bids the most. So we built the listing around the work and the paperwork, put it up at no reserve and let the market decide.

The auction

7,570 views, 731 watchers, 56 comments and 25 bids. It closed at no reserve on Saturday, October 24 at $20,000.

What the number means

$20,000 is the best result for a 300CD Turbo that sold on Bring a Trailer in the past seven weeks. The others in that stretch brought $13,500, $14,000 (an original-owner car), $15,000 and, the day before ours, $6,400. The $5,000 between ours and the next-best car is the premium for a coupe whose owner had already done the work, with the receipts to show it.

W123 coupes don’t reward originality the way some cars do. They reward being sorted. A clean one that needs nothing is worth noticeably more than a nice one that needs the usual list.

A winning bid on a screen isn’t a sale. This time the car sold, the buyer paid, and the owner is done.

If you own one

The cars that bring top money on Bring a Trailer share three things: the right condition for their market, complete paperwork, and a listing that answers questions before they’re asked. If you have a W123 or anything else you’ve been thinking about selling, we’ll tell you where it fits in the market and what we think it will bring. We’re a Bring a Trailer Local Partner and we handle everything from photography to the last comment.