Occam’s razor, folks.
The above car, in all probability, was owned by either Steve Jobs or by Apple, on behalf of Steve Jobs, as a company car.
For those of y’all who weren’t alive or old enough to remember the Zeitgeist of around 1983–1984–1985, one need not be a rockstar to order an executive car as the Mercedes-Benz S-class (a 500
SEC) — just a well-paid executive who needed to get around whilst appearing the part for the job, which Jobs very much was during early 1984. The draw to something like a Mercedes-Benz for someone like Jobs would have been the straightforward, intuitive, and bluntly Teutonic engineering which went into the vehicle.
None of this is surprising when one factors the way Jobs, during his second run as Apple’s executive, worked with Ive to draw
heavily from the industrial design of Dieter Rams’ Braun products. This aesthetic even resonates in the design of the NeXTstation and NeXTcube during his interstitial years of running NeXT.
A silver Mercedes-Benz
C126 luxury coupé is very much in keeping with his well-known aesthetic tastes and the ideal vehicle at the time to evince his design values in the form of rolling stock. I would have been highly sceptical had the car listed as once being driven by Jobs on CL been a staid, old-money rig like a Jaguar, a Bentley, or a Cadillac. A Mercedes-Benz or a BMW, though? Absolutely.
As for the registration card date, it was probably the day after 29 February 1984, and the person jotting down the date forgetting that February usually doesn’t have more than 28 days, with “the day after the 29th” almost
always being the 30th. It’s also prudent to remember that people didn’t have digital handheld devices telling them the date at every moment, nor did everyone use digital wristwatches. An analogue wristwatch with a date indicator would simply show “30” when, in fact, it was March 1st.
Further to this, a car dealership in 1984, even one selling Mercedes-Benz models in San Jose, California, probably didn’t have more than a handful of desktop computers running something like DOS on an IBM PC XT. And DOS applications of the time weren’t really known for always showing the current date and time on the monochrome CRT. And those computers were probably not in a salesperson’s office, but in the accounting office and maybe the dealer manager’s office.
I would even hazard a guess that the car itself stayed with Apple after Jobs was sacked in ’85, and subsequently didn’t get a lot of corporate use. And at some point, the company probably sold the car to a private individual, after which it probably changed hands a few times. Given the above region where the car was listed on CL recently, it’s probable the car has mostly remained in central and northern California throughout its entire existence.
