Grey Market 107 SL

Click on the Mercedes link in the left menu.

It's apparently from Munich, Year is not known ?

Ximinez

Using that chassis number, you cannot determine the year.

107 is the body 046 is the model 1 is left hand drive 2 is auto trans 000845 is the serial number

You can determine quite a lot more by querying:

Ximinez

And I might add, good luck with the car! The real 500SL was never imported into the US because there is not enough room under it to put the correct size cat convertor on it to clean it up to pass Calif emissions for 7 years/70K miles. All the grey market ones that got in just required a cat on it, so the importers put little ones on that would fit; like from Pintos. They overheated, got red hot, and the cars caught on fire. Hey, they were legal as far as the EPA was concerned.... just not safe. Close to 90% of the grey 500SL's burned to the ground. NOT BS!

That website shows the selling dealer and the options from the data card. But it said the same thing I said in answering the original question. You cannot determine the year from that chassis number. THAT was his question.

cannot determine the year

But the VIN lookup gives much more information than what could be encoded in the VIN number. So the fact that it's not available has to do with the data in the database rather than the digit codes in the number.

Ximinez

cannot determine the

the VIN number. So

rather than the digit

If I look up my own (originally German) car's data I do get the year (well, I get 87 where it should've been 88).

Ximinez

Paul,

You already have the VIN decoded thanks to Karl's reply.

Here's the rest of what you are looking for:

500 SL 107.046.12.000817 was built on June 22, 1981 500 SL 107.046.12.000873 was built on July 10, 1981

Your car was built between June 22 and July 10, 1981, so it seems to be a 1981 model.

Best regards, Danny

PaulG wrote:

In the parts of the US where inspection is nominal or nonexistent-which is surprisingly much if you live outside California or the Northeast-one simply punches or removes the cat, fixing the problem. Grey market cars cheap CAN be excellent buys if you can pull some shenanigans like this. Worst case scenario: gut the fuel, engine management and ignition systems and put in a LPG tank, hang an Impco mixer off the air metering and figure out a way to run aftermarket distributorless ignition off the stock cam and crank sensors.

Also undersized cats will fail but you would have to come up with some definite statitistics proven with DMV and insurance or fire service documentation for me to believe overheating cats cause a huge number of catastrophic vehicle fires. Charring the carpet, maybe. Total burndowns are almost invariably a fuel leak issue, or in rare cases an electrical short, in modern cars with electric fuel pumps and no shutoffs as on race cars and aircraft.