I SPENT 24 hours last week in a car older than some of the people who’ll read this column, and it rearranged something in my head that I’m still trying to put back together.

The car was a Mercedes-Benz 500E, built in 1992 by Porsche of all companies, in one of the stranger arrangements in car manufacturing history. Mercedes needed a V8 flagship and couldn’t fit the wider bodywork down its own production line, so it sent the job to its supposed rival across town in Zuffenhausen. The result is a big, quiet, understated saloon that looks like nothing much until you start it.

I’d expected the performance to be the thing that got me. It wasn’t. What got me was everything else.

There is no screen in this car. Not one. The centre console has three chrome-rimmed dials, one for fan speed, one for airflow direction, and between them a little cluster of buttons for the air conditioning, recirculation and rear screen heater.

Turn a dial, and you can feel exactly where it’s set without taking your eyes off the road.

Below that sits a Becker Mexico 2000, a cassette radio with proper numbered preset buttons and a tiny amber display, the kind of unit that made you feel like you’d achieved something just by finding a station. No menus. No sub-menus. No voice assistant misunderstanding you and setting the interior to 30 degrees when you asked it to open a window.

Even the cruise control gave me pause.

The stalk on the steering column for the cruise control has two labels in German, BESCHL and VERZÖG – one to go faster, one to go slower – holdovers from a car built for a market that never expected to need an English translation.

I found myself doing something I haven’t done in a modern car in years: not looking down. Every input I needed was exactly where my hand expected it to be, and I built up a working knowledge of the cabin within about 10 minutes that I still have days later.

Compare that to some new cars I test where I’m three menus deep trying to turn off a lane-keep chime while doing 100km/h on the M50, genuinely more distracted by the car’s own systems than I would be by anything happening outside it.

The little details add up too. The wood veneer running across the dash and down the centre console is real burr walnut, not a printed film, and it’s worn in a way that only comes from three decades of hands resting on it.

The seats are grey perforated leather, simple and sober, with heating switches worked by two toggles rather than a touchscreen slider. There’s a proper metal ignition key with a leather fob, and turning it produces a small mechanical ceremony that a start button will never replicate.

And then there’s the engine. Five litres, naturally aspirated, no turbo, no hybrid assistance, nothing between your right foot and the noise except throttle cable and physics.

I’ve driven plenty of EVs that are quicker in a straight line than this car ever was and the Nissan Ariya I had driven over in to collect the car from Edgewood Automotive in Cork would leave this 500E for dust, but in 1992 this was other-worldly performance.

With 322hp, 480Nm of torque, a six-second sprint to 100km/h and a top speed, limited, to 250km/h this thing had outstanding performance at the time, and it felt like very few of the horses had escaped in the years since. 

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We often describe these older Mercedes-Benz as tanks, because they were built very much to last, but the car is practically a featherweight in modern terms, coming in at around 1,700kg, while the Ariya I left behind weighs a whopping 600kg more. That is like carrying around about five Tadgh Furlong’s in the Mercedes. That would be a fun, but very cozy spin. 

But quickness was never really the point of this engine. It’s the way the power builds, the way the sound changes character as the revs climb, the faint mechanical tremor that comes up through the seat and the wheel and tells you, honestly, exactly how hard the car is working. An EV gives you a shove. This gave me a conversation.

I don’t say any of this as an old man shouting at electric clouds. I like where cars are going, and I think a lot of modern safety tech has genuinely saved lives that a 1992 Mercedes never had to worry about protecting. But there was something clarifying about a day with no screens, no chimes, no assistant, and a V8 that needed nothing from me except a bit of respect. It made me wonder how much of what we’ve added to cars in three decades has actually made the experience of driving one better, versus just making it busier.

If you fancy going looking for one of your own, keep an eye on DoneDeal Cars. Good 500Es are scarce and pricier than they used to be, since word has clearly gotten out and you’d probably need €75,000-€80,000 for a nice one like the one I had and you would have got it for half that five years ago, but every so often a genuinely well-kept one surfaces, wood veneer, Becker radio and all, and I’d say it’s worth the hunt for anyone curious what driving felt like before the industry decided every car needed a tablet bolted to the dashboard.

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.

Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with DoneDeal Ltd.