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
