Welcome to Down On The Street, where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Mercedes-Benz built the R107 for nearly 20 years- definitely DOTS-worthy!

I'm guilty of neglecting these cars in this series; I see them all over the island, but this is only the third R107 so far (after this '82 and this '87; we've also seen this W113 SL convertible). I found this very clean example parked on the block that gave us the '71 Evinrude and the '80 Datsun 280ZX.

In '82, the SL came standard with a 3.8 liter SOHC V8 that made 215 horsepower; that may not sound like much, but by Late Malaise Era standards it was quite impressive. The '82 380SL also came standard with a $38,993 price tag (86 grand in 2009 bucks), which was about $2,000 more than what you'd have paid for a brand-new '82 BMW 633CSi and approximately three times the cost of an '82 Mitsubishi Starion LS. Which would you have taken, the Benz, the 6 Series, or three Starions?

Send an email to Murilee Martin, the author of this post, at murilee@jalopnik.com.