Pagoda SL Group
W113 Pagoda SL Group => General Discussion => Topic started by: perry113 on August 07, 2016, 02:00:35
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I was talking to William Gustin today who is a German Mercedes Porsche mechanic who worked on W111's and Pagoda's back when they were new cars. He was raving on and on about the 230SL being his favorite of the W113 line with it's engine specification being unique to the 230SL. He also insisted that there were less 230SL automatics produced than 4 speed manuals. Can anyone validate this claim?
Does the factory and forum have the production ratio of 230SL 4 speed manuals to automatics?
Can anyone expand upon what the forum has listed?
Here are the 230sl numbers as listed here:
http://www.sl113.org/wiki/DataCard/USModelYear
Year Total Production Total Export US Export
1963 1465 693 140
1964 6911 3326 782
1965 6325 3663 1429
1966 4945 3675 2067
1967 185 369 334
Total 19831 11726 4752
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I'd say less than 90 cars were auto in 1963. I have no idea how many were made in total.
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Hello Peter,
Benz Dr. (Dan) is right.
At the beginning of the production run there were very few 113s with Automatic, and the later the production run was (late 280) the more there were, perhaps close to 80%.
Mercedes did not count properly how many were automatics and how many were stick shifts...
You "can" somehow count that by the engine serial numbers that were built since both engine types were numbered starting from 1.
E.g. for the 230 SL engine (M127II) the engine is part of the parts catalogue (10062, 1097 and 10126). The running changes were recorded in the parts list, e.g. upt to serial no. and from serial number (+1) onwards.
As there were plenty of changes on these cars & engines, the changes go up to about approx. 14 - 15,000 engines -10- and -20- (i.e. stick stift) and about 6,000 -12- and -22-. The numbers here are from my memories, so not exact.
What you do see is this:
1) there were more engines in total than cars (about 20,000 something versus 19,831 230ies)
2) about 2/3 or a bit more 230ies were stick shift, the rest were automatics.
It was reported (but I do not have a good literature citation here) that about half of the 250ies were stick shift and the other half automatics and about 2/3 (or a few more) 280ies were automatics, the remainder stick shifts.
Fact is :
1) the closer to 1963 - the less automatics
2) the closer to 1971 - the more automatics
3) the closer to 1963 - the more leather interior cars
4) the closer to 1971 - the more MB Tex cars.
These numbers are _no_ database numbers from an Excel-, SAP- or Oracle-like database. There were only paper datacards but no proper calculations on this (only the export numbers).
But roughly the numbers are correct.
Achim
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Thank you for the replies.
The 8th digit in each W113 vin number represents what transmission (0 manual 2 automatic) so it would be easy to filter out if the master VIN list if it was in Excel.
The question then is does the full list exist that type of format. Maybe someone like Gunter Engelen or somebody who had or still has access to the Pagoda factory archives.