We photographed the Mercedes-Benz 200D (w110) pictured below on a recent trip to Sweden. We saw it for the first time when it blasted by us going the other way, and we unexpectedly caught up with it several hours later in a small town.

Broadly speaking, we were thoroughly impressed with how good the Swedes are at keeping old cars on the road. Many of them are Saabs and Volvos, as you’d expect, but there are also quite a few classic American cars roaming the roads and a lot of German cars. This 200D is a perfect example of what you can stumble upon in the more rural parts of Sweden.

It’s surprisingly rust-free for a car that’s presumably lived through nearly five decades of Swedish winters, though we’ve been told towns in the north of the country don’t salt the roads. It’s also remarkably straight, which hints that it has managed to avoid a collision with a moose, an elk, or any of the large mammals that routinely run across Swedish roads.