A Daimler employee at the Sindelfingen plant has driven his Mercedes-Benz 200 D W124 for more than 1 million kilometers (621,371miles).

Bought new from the factory back in 1992, five years after joining the automaker, Michael Nickl went for a very Spartan version of the car, as he couldn’t afford a better equipped model, after paying his student loan.

It has a standard midnight blue color, on top of a light-grey fabric interior, with the list of options including an electric sliding sunroof, center armrest, central locking, radio, and rear head restraints. Powering it is a diesel engine that churns out a laughable for today’s standards, 75 horsepower and 126 Nm (93 lb-ft) of torque, that has averaged 6 l/100 km (39.2 mpg US) over the last 25 years.

Nickl’s plan was to hold the car for a year, before selling it for more than he paid for as he had an employee discount, a practice that was quite common back then, but he remembers prices hitting rock bottom, as “the first suspicions about diesel particulates causing cancer” appeared. The 55-year old, who still works in Sindelfingen and is now part of the GLE assembly crew, decided to keep it, and over the years he ended up changing the clutch, brakes, alternator, and water pump.

Just like the entire W124 lineup, the car turned out to be very reliable, except for the rust problems and a small incident back in 2003, when the clutch failed, at 445,000 km (276,510 miles), just as the E-Class was climbing a gradient. One year later, the executive sedan suffered a small accident after rear-ending another vehicle, and needed to have its headlights, radiator grille and bonnet replaced, all of which came from the scrap yard, while the bumper was bought new.

Nickl may be in the automotive industry, but he is no car aficionado:”For me, my car is an object of utility. I rarely wash it”, he says. However, that doesn’t mean that the old E-Class was cheap to run and maintain, as the Excel spreadsheets, kept by the man, show that the general maintenance cost was €58,563.26 ($62,847), while another €53,786.28 ($57,720) were spent on fuel.

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