1940 Mercedes-Benz Rometsch Cabriolet

Patina. If cars could talk, this one would have tales, starting as a limousine in wartime Berlin, then as the recipient of a sporty cabriolet body by an obscure German coachbuilder, then as a traveler to the New World that took it as far as Albuquerque, then to a barn in Michigan, and finally to California. This 85-year-old Mercedes with a 78-year-old custom coachwork body spent over 50 years in a barn.

In 1940, British bombers were already in the skies over Germany, attacking industrial targets such as aircraft factories and plants that built airplane components. Daimler-Benz was one of them, a supplier of V-12 engines to Luftwaffe fighters and bombers even as the company still built trucks and passenger cars for the domestic market. At some point, one of the final Mercedes-Benz 320 civilian models, a Pullman limo, rolled off the line at the company’s Stuttgart plant, headed for Berlin and likely Nazi government duty. What happened after it left the factory, or how the car survived a war that flattened much of Germany is unknown. Also unknown is who bought the car in 1948 and brought it to Karosserie F. Rometsch to be lavishly rebodied.

In 1948, during the Berlin Airlift, the car’s new body took shape from hand-beaten steel and copious lead filler. At some point in the late ’40s or early ’50s, the Mercedes made its way across the Atlantic. The story is again unknown, but it was probably the work of a U.S. serviceman, or a German rocket scientist.

After the war, the Reich’s missile men immigrated to work on rocket development at the U.S. Army’s ballistic missile range in White Sands, New Mexico. The fact this car’s known history begins in Albuquerque is suggestive, as is an old business card found in the car for a chrome shop just across the border in Mexico, where the German rocket engineers used to go regularly to get drunk.

A new owner bought the car in the late ’50s. In 1968, he decided to move back to Michigan. He flat towed the car to his barn and that is where it would sit for the next 50 years. After some work, the engine fired up for likely the first time in five or six decades with a cloud of smoke and a sporty snore from its tailpipe.

The old Mercedes has given its current owner plenty of joy in the heavily patinaed state it’s in. “The goal was to get it together, get all the pieces on it, make it run and drive, and take it places. The couple events I’ve taken it to so far, it gets a ton of attention just like this. So as far as restoration goes, what's the point?”