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Which is why the more, shall we call them, aloof manufacturers, don't make estates. Audi make an Avant, which is supposedly aimed at crating your latest wine purchase from Italy to Austria, whilst BMW make a Touring, which is better designed for being thrown sideways around the Nurburgring. Mercedes, on the other hand, just use the letter T. This can stand for Touring if you so desired, or it can be Transport, or even Towing A Horse, but it is not for esTate. Or Kombi either. That would just be too gauche.

That's not to stop people referring to them as estates, of course, because some people just don't know any better. And that's the universal appeal of the W123 - it was the Mercedes that people could actually afford, wanted to buy, and felt good doing so. It was a luxuriously large saloon with just enough chrome to back up the snobbery, but not enough leather to mark you out as a pretentious loser. And nothing oozed practical sumptuousness more than the estate, with its acres of glass, conservative upright stance and direct, crisp body lines. Just look at those alloy wheels - you wouldn't even know they were alloy if I hadn't told you. That's saved you getting down on your hands and knees to rub your moistened finger around the rim, waiting for that ringing sound.

The W123 is the Mercedes that doesn't mind mucking out the stables on a Sunday afternoon; the Shire horse that still looks good in front of the carriage, and in that case it puts the Avant and the Touring to shame, seeing as its as comfortable lugging gallons of Pinot Grigio over the Alps as it is hooning through Africa on the Safari rally. So what makes this such a thoroughbred workhorse?

If you ask most W123 owners, you'll hear lots of "lasts." Last of the handbuilt Mercs, the W123. Last of the true Mercs (before the Chrysler costcutters stepped in and cheapened everything.) But definitely last of the REAL Mercedes, which means hand-designed, hand-drawn, with no computer-aided moulding to take the edges off or smooth out the soul. No fine-line designing of eking the design specs out to the limit, this was the Mercedes with that little bit more. This was when the Germans said "yes, yes, vee haff made out preziess kalkoolations, but vee vill add a liddul more, juzt in case." And "a liddul more" in this case meant a whole extra cylinder. That's over-engineering for you.

However, 3.0 diesel lump under this bonnet would have managed less than 90hp without a turbo, but that was more than generous compared with the 2.0 diesel previously offered, which only yielded 55hp. Fifty-five horsepower, to shift 1400kg of steel. You must be joking. Compared to that, 88hp is a whinnying, snorting mustang waiting to leap out of the corral.

But even if you've plumped for the 200D or the 240D (which didn't have that fifth-cylinder advantage) that over-engineering added a majestic calm to rolling along the autobahn. Encased in your better-than-leather MB-TEX vinyl seats, floating on the nitrogen-charged self-levelling suspension, letting the undulations of the road and the rythmnic roar of HGVs overtaking you soothe you into aristocratic peace, that's what the W123 was for. A Gentleman's tourer. I've had a 200D, with all its spluttering and droning and heavy fuel consumption, and when I thought I'd save a few pennies by using biodiesel, which instead stripped out 30 years of accumulated gack from the fuel tank, how did the W123 respond? By filtering it out with TWO fuel filters. TWO. Unscrew them, chuck them out, swop in the new pair and rumble onwards again for another 2000km. That's over-engineering, and it's that philosophy that lets Greek taxi drivers chug more than a million miles out of their W123's.

For the Poles, the W123 was the most majestic motor you could aspire to own in the 70's and 80's, and was christened the Beczka, or Barrel; primarily because you needed to carry that much fuel around with you to keep it going. But if you need something to drive you to an OPEC country and back, the W123 should be just your cup of T.

If you've ever heard of Geopolitics, you'll know that Poland sits in an area called the Heartland. If you haven't, it basically means that whoever has control of Europe and Asia has control of the world, and whoever controls the Heartland controls Europe and Asia. So the philosophy goes, anyway. The Heartland, then, is the Breadbasket; the fertile land which feeds the population. Think Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Think Eurasia. Of course, it's an outdated philosophy nowadays, but it helps explain a few things about just how big the Soviet Union considered itself, and why it felt it necessary to take over Poland. One solution for all, and all that.

So when you take a sizeable country, like Poland, and look at its needs, you can categorize them quite simply. Poland needs cars. Bam, new factory, in Warsaw, called the Car Factory (FSO,) making one car - the Warszawa. Great for ferrying people around (considering it's the size of a boat), but cumbersome if it's just you on your own so, boom, FSM, the Small Car Factory, making the Syrena. Need to shuttle a few tonnes of coal to a remote village? You'll need a Star, courtesy of FSC, the Heavy Goods Factory. And if you just need a pick-up, get a Tarpan, the bastard offspring of FSR, the Farmer's Car Factory.

It should come as no surprise, then, that once production was up and people needed to buy things in shops (yes, Communism was bad but it wasn't ALL empty shelves and martial law) you'd need a Delivery Van. And lo, in 1952 the powers-that-be created the FSD, the Delivery Car Factory, churning out the all-new Nysa N57.

Well, that's what the Communists would have you believe. In actuality, the N57 was just a Warszawa M20 chassis and engine shipped off to a mountain village to be rebodied by the Nysa Steel Body Shop. By 1968 however, the designers had advanced enough to scrap almost all the Warszawa-derived stuff in favour of heavier-duty gear (nine-spring clutches and independant front suspension with multiplesprings, amongst other things) and called the final project the N521/522.

The 521/522 were the final evolutions of the Nysa, with the only clear differences being a 10cm higher load height for the 522, plus a 4-speed gearbox instead of three, and (wait for it) a better air filter for the engine. Or at least, that's what the handbook says. In reality, the true beauty of the Nysa platform for both 521 and 522 was its versatility. Once the Warszawa chassis had been ditched so that the engine could be placed further forward, the Nysa became a van of such practicality that, despite a few cosmetic changes, it remained essentially the same over its 44-year lifespan.

This particular 522 is a T-series, meaning 8-seater minibus. There were also 2-, 4- and 10-seater versions (F, C and M series), plus ambulances, refrigerators, half-body flatbeds and boxvans. Some came with side loading doors, some had complete transparent plastic roofs for tourist buses, but they were all 16" wheeled, 51 horse-powered monsters thundered along by that Polish power-plant, the S-21 engine. Beloved by factories and militia alike, the 522 was a common sight on Polish roads along with its FSC offspring, the Zuk.

But the conversion to Capitalism was not kind to Nysa, and after a third of a million units, the FSD was absorbed into the greater FSO structure, ditching the Nysa 522 so that the factory could make the Polonez Truck whilst the part-share twin, the Zuk, took on both the van and minibus roles by becoming the FSO-Daewoo Lublin. But you still see a few of these frog-eyed boxes, standing proud on side streets just like this one. And whilst most were unloved workhorses, patched together over the years until there's more fibreglass than sheet steel and more taped-over cardboard than actual glass, you do occasionally see a gleamer like this one, with polished paintwork and at least one shiny hubcab still attatched.