Crashing into an immovable object, you have the choice of driving a Mercedes W124 body sedan, or a Hummer. Which would you pick? If you pick the Hummer, you picked wrong. It doesn't have airbags,...
Well, the W124 itself doesn't even have side air bags (
does it even have a front passenger air bag?).
In terms of crash safety, it is so very "old school" (
with what a safety design dating way back to 1984?), lacking completely with any of the state-of-the-art safety systems today's top sedans offer.
Technology is constantly moving forward. Anything which might have once been a showcase of the best at the time it came out, leaves only a "romantic" memory later on, as technology leaves it behind especially after decades.
The car was sold in the US with a standard drivers airbag from '86 (the first year it was sold here) an optional passenger airbag from '89, and standard passenger airbag from '92. It was the first car in the United States to be sold with a modern airbag as standard. It also has pyrotechnical seatbelt pre-tensioners (another first, by the way) and remote-folding rear-seat headrests (yet another first) as well as a unique single pantographic wiper arm that clears more of the windshield, percentage-wise, of any design but the W140s twin-arm pantographic system. It also was the second design to offer the now industry-standard Multi-link rear suspension system.
Furthermore, its body structure was the stiffest in production when it went into production in 1985. It was the stiffest in production when it went out of production in 1996! Its replacement, which was retrogressive in almost every way but build cost (not to mention being extremely rust prone!), was, in fact, 3% less stiff in torsional stiffness, and 2% less stiff in bending resistance. It is capable of supporting 915% of its weight on its roof- compared to 720% of its W210 replacement.
Here is where your logic falls down: The W124 was the last mid-size Mercedes to be designed before the advent of Lexus. Like all other Mercedes built in those days, it was built on a cost-plus basis, and whatever it cost to build was what it cost to build. It was engineered to an ideal, not a price. It was aerodynamic, very good handling, very good ride, fast with six and eight cylinder engines, and was unquestioned as the safest car in the world. It was, for a decade, the blueprint from which all other cars were designed. Today, Mercedes is pretty well regarded. 20 years ago, they were considered, and in fact, were, peerless.
Its successor, the W210, was raced into production. The W124 was so expensive to build that in order to maintain sales momentum in the US, they were sold at a minimal profit for the 1994 and 1995 model years. In fact, on one particular model built to satisfy their most loyal of customers, the E300 Diesel, was sold at a loss per car of about $1400. The W210's number one design brief? Cut 25% build cost out of the E-class range. It failed to do that, until the M112 V6 and V8 engines came on line in 1998.
Excluding side-impact airbags, whose value I concede, all advances in automotive safety succeeding the W124 was in the area of electronics, a dubious area indeed. The W124 chassis, by the way, was eventually fitted with side airbags. It is still in production in South Korea, and was until the introduction of the Hyundai Genesis models, considered the best executive car in Korea- as the Ssangyong Chairman.
The design and engineering of automobiles reached their zenith with the debut of the Series-3 W124 in 1993- and have been downhill ever since.
