A 1961 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Roadster was produced in an unusual color called Fantasy Yellow, or Fantasiegelb. It was the sixth 300SL to be equipped with disc brakes and was featured by the factory at the 1961 Geneva Motor Show.
For unknown reasons, the car was repainted red shortly afterward. Its original Swiss owner kept the car until 1969. The second owner, also Swiss, then had the car in his collection until 2022. He sold it to Ralph Grieser, a classic-car dealer from Mulheim-Kärlich, a town west of Koblenz, Germany; the sale price was reported to be €1.6 million.
The 300SL had not been on the road for 50 years. When Grieser tried to register it, however, his application was denied. Another 1961 300SL, painted Fantasy Yellow, was already registered in Germany under the same chassis number.
Police investigation
The State Criminal Police Office of Baden-Württemberg took the situation seriously and conducted an investigation. It discovered that the previously registered Fantasy Yellow 300SL had been purchased in 2019 from well-known Mercedes-Benz restorer Kienle Automobiltechnik GmbH in Ditzingen, near Stuttgart.
Suspecting that Kienle could be building fake cars, the police carried out a number of searches at the premises of the company and at owner Klaus Kienle’s home. Authorities seized two 300SLs, a 300SL engine, a 300SL chassis, a tubular space frame for a 300SL, a large amount of electronic data and other unspecified objects.
In a joint press release, the State Prosecutors’ Office in Stuttgart and the State Criminal Police Office of Baden-Württemberg expressed their suspicion of “fraudulent trading with exclusive classic cars,” and charged Kienle Automobiltechnik with commercial fraud. According to the police, “this company manufactured and sold professional duplicates of vintage cars that had not been traded for a long time.”
Kienle responds
Owner Klaus Kienle is thoroughly incensed about the accusation and is not taking it lying down. He quickly issued his own press release, vehemently denying all of the charges. Kienle insists that he and his company had nothing to do with the Fantasy Yellow 300SL beyond selling it. The car was owned by a customer, who had acquired it from another company that had since become insolvent.
Kienle insists there was no reason to doubt the authenticity of the car. They were given a comprehensive range of documents and papers that gave no reason for concern or suspicion. It was not requested that Kienle Automobiltechnik retain an expert to verify the authenticity of the vehicle. “This 300SL Roadster was never in the workshop of Kienle Automobiltechnik for the purpose of restoration. We only brokered the sale of this vehicle as part of our trading business,” said the company’s statement.
Kienle says there is no reason for him or his company to even think about getting involved with counterfeit cars: “I have earned an outstanding worldwide reputation and a great deal of trust through my knowledge and my experience built up over a period of four decades. For this reason alone, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in being associated with any form of criminal wheeling and dealing.”
How is this possible?
Obviously, one of these cars is a fake. But it has to be a really good fake, as it fooled several people whom we might expect to know the difference. If the Fantasy Yellow car is the fake, it fooled a dealer, a long-term collector owner, and one of the premier 300SL restoration shops in Europe. If the red car is the fake, it fooled two long-term collector owners and a classic-car dealer who paid a lot of money for it.
So just how hard is it to build a fake 300SL? To find out, we asked one of the most experienced Mercedes-Benz restorers here in the U.S., Paul Russell, owner of Paul Russell & Company in Essex, MA.
“You might be amazed, but it’s not really all that hard,” Russell said. “Engineering drawings for most every part of the 300SL have been made available by Mercedes-Benz. We have complete drawings for every body part on the car, and we use them regularly for repair and restoration work. The tube-frame chassis is made out of 25-mm chrome-moly tubing, and detailed diagrams for every piece are available in the workshop manual.”
Still, it seems like a tall order to fabricate an entire car from scratch when you don’t have the factory equipment available. “Not really,” Russell explains. “These cars were largely hand-built to begin with. Back in the day, replacement parts always came oversized and had to be fitted by hand.”
Sourcing no-longer-available 300SL parts isn’t all that hard either, Russell told us, as the 300SL shares components with the Mercedes 300 sedan. Many of the parts needed can be sourced from junkyards.
No doubt the German police must be thinking that Kienle should have known if the car he was brokering was a fake. After all, he is one of the most experienced 300SL restorers around and shouldn’t be so easy to fool.
How fair is it to expect a broker to know? Russell says not fair at all. Obvious fakes are one thing, but well-executed fakes can be hard to spot. “If you’re going to confirm the authenticity of a car, then you have to do a deep dive,” he said. “I know some cars where I would be afraid to ever say the car is authentic, no matter how closely I examined it.”
Protecting yourself
In an era where “barn find” cars can be more valuable than fully restored versions of the same model, one needs to recognize that these are the cars with the highest risk of having a clone. That isn’t rocket science — if you’re going to build and register a fake, your best bet is to use the chassis number of a car that hasn’t been seen for years.
When you are looking at a car that has miraculously returned from the scrap heap of history, you should be even more vigilant about the possibility that the car is a fake, no matter how compelling its story might be. It isn’t realistic to expect a dealer or an auction company to know if the car you are buying is a fake.
A smart buyer will always condition a significant purchase on two separate inspections, one for condition and another for authenticity. In some cases, the same person can conduct both, but the required skills and familiarity diverge, and you often end up needing two experts.
The authenticity expert may well be the harder one to find. For many of the most-valuable cars, only a handful of people in the entire world might have the skills to do so. Getting one of them together with the car can take time and substantial expense.
The experts do their job by looking for things that can be quite subtle. Little things like welding styles may be the easiest way to tell. Other times it’s the various stampings, looking not just at location but font, stamping depth, irregularity and other clues. Metallurgical tests can tell you the age and molecular composition of the metals, but it’s impractical to take metal scrapings off every car you examine. Usually, this doesn’t happen until suspicions have been raised.
An examination of this sort is clearly not a simple one to perform. It’s easy to get fooled by a highly skilled, highly motivated crook. Consider also that if an expert declares a car to be authentic, and it turns out not to be, his client loses a lot of money. And every one of these clients is able to afford high-priced legal help when that happens. How large a fee does it take to justify that risk?
As for the Kienle case, it is ongoing. The company says it will continue to work closely with the authorities while pursuing legal action against “those individuals who are deliberately fomenting defamatory allegations” and “the individuals and companies involved in the fraud.” We will be keeping tabs on this one. ♦
John Draneas is an attorney in Oregon and has been SCM’s “Legal Files” columnist since 2003. His recently published book The Best of Legal Files can be purchased on our website. John can be contacted at [email protected]. His comments are general in nature and are not intended to substitute for consultation with an attorney.