Whether for vehicles long out of production or for modern ones, your best source for Genuine Mercedes-Benz Parts is Mercedes-Benz.

This month’s Parts News covers parts we don’t expect many of our readers to ever need.  The simple fact that they are available tells you a great deal about Mercedes-Benz the carmaker and the company’s attitude toward replacement parts.

While replacing the heater core and A/C evaporator in our main feature this month, it was necessary to open the heater box to access both cores.  Opening the box, we snapped a pivot pin off one of the air control doors, rendering it nonfunctional.

The likelihood of finding a replacement door for a 20-year old car never built in huge numbers didn’t seem high, at least in the short time available before the owner expected the vehicle back.  But there are so many work-hours involved in the job, the prospect of gluing the stub of the pin on and hoping it would hold was disconcerting.

Sure enough, the dealer did not have that door in stock.  It took him a full day to get it delivered to the independent shop doing the work.  That, frankly, was amazing, even to those of us working with Mercedes-Benz cars for some time.  How many of these things do they sell in a year even worldwide?  I don’t know, but they have them available.

But there’s an even more astonishing story about parts availability.  As you may know, to commemorate the first car, the 1886 Karl Benz Patentwagen, Mercedes-Benz has built a very small number of offroad-only replicas of the car, described in some detail in our September 2002 issue.  These are, of course, expensive and impractical collectors’ toys.  While that car is much simpler than a 1983 300 SD TurboDiesel, to say nothing of more modern vehicles (there are not 50 numbered parts to the whole replica Patentwagen), its numbers are tiny and the prospects that any of the replicas will wear out is hardly more than theoretically imaginable.  Nonetheless, every part of that car is available today from Mercedes-Benz, by catalog part number.

Got an old car with a broken or missing piece, and despair of finding a replacement? If it’s a Mercedes-Benz, don’t be so pessimistic.  The odds are they can deliver every piece for every vehicle they’ve built in the last sixty years and many for vehicles even older than that.  Doubt it?  Call your Genuine Mercedes-Benz Parts source for a quote.  No, an engine block for a 1955 Gullwing won’t be cheap.  It wasn’t in 1955, either. But you can still get one.