Road trip to Brisbane in my 1981 240D

January 14, 2025

This weekend I took a road trip to Brisbane in my 240D. It was my first ever road trip in the car and I wasn’t sure what to expect. While I think the 240D is at its best in the city, it did very well on the road trip and I really enjoyed the experience.

The trip to Brisbane was fairly last minute. There was a car I wanted to go and have a look at. Most people would fly up, but I decided to drive. I fly a lot for work and have come to really hate the flying experience. Its something I would only want to do if paid to, or the distances make it a necessity. Since the 240D was all fixed up with the new fuel tank and rebuilt brakes, it also felt like a good opportunity to experience the car on the open road.

Before I left on Saturday morning, I brimmed the tank and set off. My destination was Warwick, QLD. I planned to take the inland route. I took the motorway until just past Newcastle, before turning off onto the Buckets Way. The 240D did well on the motorway and was quite happy to cruise at motorway speeds. There were a couple of hills where the speed dropped, but now all the algae is out of the tank, it was generally able to cruise up all but the steepest hills with traffic.

The Buckets Way is a scenic undulating road that was a nice break from the motorway. From there, I continued onto Thunderbolts way, which was very pleasant to drive on. The traffic was minimal and the 240D was able to handle the twisty sections very well. For quite a while I was driving behind a modern SUV. The 240D was able to go around corners faster and with more comfort, since it is not so top heavy. It also has more comfortable suspension, you could really see the SUV bouncing around. It was only on steep uphill sections where it would get away. I was always able to catch up again.

After Thunderbolts Way, I took the New England Highway, which I also enjoyed. There was one very steep section where the 240D struggled a little. On hills, the redline in each gear becomes important. On medium sized hills, it can only maintain speed in 3rd gear. Redline for 3rd gear is 100km/h, so it can sit at around 90km/h. On steep hills, redline for 2nd gear is 60km/h, so it can sit around 50km/h. Going around Black mountain, there was a section where I had to maintain 50 for a while. However, on the whole drive I probably lost perhaps 10 minutes at most – the 240D did better than I thought it would on the twisty and hilly roads. This was all with the A/C on. I passed far more cars than passed me.

Traffic got a bit heaver around Glen Innes, but overall this route was nice and peaceful and a great way to drive up to Brisbane, even during school holidays. The weather was quite rainy, but the 240D handled it well. I had put on new wipers before I left, and they cleaned the windscreen very well. I ordered them for the car, but they were a few cm shorter than the ones I took off, so the overlap wasn’t quite as good as it should be. Perhaps they sent me the wipers for the coupe.

By the time I reached Warwick, I had covered 787km and still had about a quarter of a tank showing. I expected it was a bit less than that, as I have the normal W123 grounding issue in the instrument cluster that also causes the temperature gauge to read a bit high. Something to fix.

I had driven all day in the W123 and I was comfortable and and didn’t feel tired when I arrived. The next morning I filled up the car – using 70.53l and 8.96l/100km. I think this is very good given I wasn’t trying to save fuel and I spent much of the day at full throttle.

I then drove into Brisbane to meet some friends at the Brisbane Car Museum and for lunch. On the way I happened to pass the XXXX brewery. Since one of the friends I was meeting had moved up to Brisbane, I had been joking about him needing to start drinking XXXX now he’s a Queenslander. A photo outside the place was a must.

We met for lunch and then headed over to the museum, where we also randomly met another MBCQ member. I’ve covered the museum separately here. After the museum, we went and checked out each others cars in a local park. We had two W126 (560SEL and 420SEL) and two W123 (230E and my 240D). Given the trip was such late notice, it was great to catch up.

The next morning, after I checked out the car that was the main driver of the trip, I got on the road at about 11am. Since I had to get back that day, I took the motorway. It had been more than 10 years since I did this drive and it has changed a lot. The last time was when I purchased my 1970 Citroen DS21 back in 2013. These days most of the towns have been bypassed. There is still a big section around Coffs Harbour and another big section south of Raymond Terrace that are surface streets, but the majority of it is divided highway.

It is far more stressful to drive than the inland route. The speed limit is constantly changing down to 100km/h or even 90km/h for no apparent reason, other than to provide a place for aggressive revenue raising speed enforcement. The traffic is much thicker, often with gormless SUVs that randomly slow down or speed up for reasons only known to themselves.

I refueled just before I reached the NSW border. The prices seemed quite a bit cheaper in Queensland. In my time driving around Brisbane, covered 287km at 8.71l/100km. That was a combination of city traffic as well as the open road, with the A/C on max the whole time.

The rest of the trip back was fairly uneventful. The 240D just cruised along at the freeway speed, happy to overtake the SUVs as we went. I was impressed that the car could cruise at just under 90% of its top speed for hours at a time without issue. Not many 40 year old cars could do that. The W123 is a very comfortable place and I did the drive with two breaks for lunch and dinner. The car is a little noisy at motorway speeds, but it is very happy.

I even noticed that when driving up the steep hill on the southern side of the Mooney Mooney bridge, I was able to cruise up in fourth gear with no problem. When I first bought the car, it could not maintain these speeds. I guess that is mostly due to the clogged fuel strainer, but a good long run like this can’t have hurt either. On the trip I passed 190,000km on the car.

Once I passed Gosford, I started to wonder what my fuel situation was like. It was still showing about a 3rd of a tank, which seemed too high. I figured if my consumption was the same as the way up, I should be able to get home on one tank, but I was expecting it to read lower. I put this down to the grounding issue that causes the temperature gauge to read high. There are not really any petrol stations along the motorway in this section, so I kept going. It was 11pm, so most of the local service stations were closed.

It turns out I should have paid more attention to this, and turned off to refuel. I ran out of fuel less than 20km from my home and about 4km from a 24 hour petrol station. Since I was on a main road (but not motorway) – the NRMA would not send out a patrol with 5 liters of fuel, I had to be towed off the main road before they were allowed to help. That seemed odd to me, but it was less than an hour from running out of fuel to being on my way again. The tow truck dropped me off at the 24 hour service station.

Many cars advertise a theoretical fuel tank size, and not all of it is accessible. I was curious to see how many liters I would put in from empty. Turns out it is all accessible, as I put in 80.56l. Driving at motorway speeds used more diesel than the twisty roads, in this case 9.5l per 100km. It wasn’t a busy night, so it was less than an hour from breakdown to being back on the road, including priming the fuel system.

I arrived back home at 11:30pm. While I have other cars that are probably better road trip cars, the 240D did incredibly well. I thoroughly enjoyed taking it on a road trip and would be happy to do so again. There is an event for the 50 year anniversary of the W123 in Canberra in January 2025 that I plan to attend in the 240D.

On the trip I wondered if I would see many other classics on the road, particularly classic Mercedes-Benz. However, I only saw one in Brisbane, besides the group I met up with. It was a 420SEC. Of all the cars to see, the 420SEC would not have been my guess due to its very low production numbers and that it was never sold new in Australia. Yet there it was in daily use.