Mercedes-Benz 500E
Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz
This is the catalogue record of the Mercedes-Benz 500E, one of 383 models Mercedes-Benz has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1991. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Mercedes-Benz 500E properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Opel Opel Astra, the Volvo Cars Volvo 850, the Dodge Dodge Viper — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Mercedes-Benz 500E reads like this: the record lists its engine as 5.0 L M119 V8; kerb weight is recorded at 1710 kg; drive goes through 4-speed automatic. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear. Production is recorded at 10,479 units, which makes it a low-volume car in industry terms.
Within Mercedes-Benz's own catalogue the Mercedes-Benz 500E sits alongside the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, the Mercedes-Benz C124, the Mercedes-Benz C253, the Mercedes-Benz C254. It was succeeded by the Mercedes-Benz E 50/55/63 AMG. Design is credited to Bruno Sacco, Michael Hölscher, Michael Mönig. Assembly is recorded at Sindelfingen and Zuffenhausen, Germany.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
The catalogue records what the Mercedes-Benz 500E was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
Tap a star. Ratings are kept on your device and feed the most-loved list.
Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.