My brother bought a previous 3 litre straight six E Class estate really cheaply. It is an awesome car for the money.

My folks are quite thinking about a newer 3.2V6 estate. Does anyone have one? Any reliability issues at higher mileages, 100k plus? Bodywork, wheelarches especially seem to be prone to rust.

Any Merc forums I should check out?

Yep, I picked a high mileage 04 up about 3 months ago and it is a fine car for an old git like me (or your folks). Google 'mercedes rust' and you will see it was a really bad problem when Merc moved to water based paints. If you do your research you can work out which ones to avoid.

An ex-colleague had one as a company car (06 I think), spent more time in the garage than any car I'd known – and severly expensive for MB servicing. And a lot of the problems were around all the tech.

Looks like my brother got one of the 'lucky' rust free ones. Googling 'mercedes rust' scared the life out of me. You'd have thought MB would have sorted that out within the production run.

W124