Two 540Ks for Romania: the forgotten Special Roadster on Brătianu Boulevard

Pre-war Romania had a surprisingly rich taste for exotic machinery, but few cars matched the glamour, or the mystery, of the Mercedes-Benz 540K Special Roadster. Rarer than a Duesenberg and more theatrical than almost anything else on European roads, only six examples were built with the spare wheel enclosed within the bodywork. Remarkably, two of those six ended up in Romania.

One of them is familiar: the car delivered to King Michael I, a Special Roadster with distinctive one-off bodywork, a five-speed gearbox, a radio, and royal plates. Its post-war odyssey is relatively well-charted. After 1948 the car drifted eastward, surfaced for sale in Kiev in spring 1960, then spent lengthy spells in Astrakhan and Moscow before eventually finding its way back to the West. A convoluted journey, but a known one.

The other Romanian 540K Special Roadster, however, is the car that time forgot.

In October 1939, German photographer Willy Pragher captured a striking black Special Roadster on Bucharest’s Brătianu Boulevard — one of the clearest surviving images of a second 540K in Romania. The car wore licence plate 24-B, and unlike the King’s, it had the classic Sindelfingen Special Roadster lines as known from the factory catalogue.

Ownership remains uncertain. One plausible name is the philosopher and newspaper owner Nae Ionescu, known to have “a sporting, black, two-seater Mercedes with a red leather interior.” That description matches the Pragher car almost too neatly, though a definitive link has yet to surface.

Whatever its owner, the Bucharest Special Roadster was an extraordinary sight in a city that still mixed horse carts with Hispano-Suizas. The 540K’s long hood, sweeping fenders, and supercharged eight-cylinder would have been a staggering presence amid the traffic of 1939.

And then — silence. The fate of 24-B is unknown.

A peculiar thread in the story appears around 1962–63. Locals in Râșnov, a small Transylvanian town, remember a black Mercedes convertible with “a compressor” and a red leather interior. They believed it to be the ex-King’s car. This was impossible: King Michael’s 540K, with its unmistakable one-off body, was already deep in the USSR by that time. But could the Râșnov car have been 24-B?

The description fits. The timeline — nearly twenty-five years after the Bucharest photograph — is plausible for a high-value car that survived the war in private or concealed ownership. And provincial towns in the early 1960s often became unexpected sanctuaries for pre-war luxury machinery.

No photographs have surfaced, and the trail ends as abruptly as it begins. If the Râșnov sighting was indeed the missing Special Roadster, it may have been one of the last times 24-B was seen alive.

Of the six enclosed-spare-wheel Special Roadsters built, only three are known to survive today. That two of them were delivered new to Romania — a country with only a handful of wealthy buyers in the late 1930s — is one of those improbable stories that make pre-war motoring history endlessly fascinating.

One car, the King’s, followed a dramatic but traceable arc across the Iron Curtain. The other, 24-B, appears briefly in 1939, perhaps again in the early 1960s — and then fades completely from the record.

Until further evidence emerges, it remains one of the great mysteries of the Mercedes-Benz 540K lineage. But thanks to a single photograph taken on Brătianu Boulevard, we at least know that Romania once enjoyed not one, but two of the most spectacular roadsters ever built.