By Robert Bravender
Matt Purselle’s first encounter with a Mercedes-Benz was as a child, riding around in his grandmother’s 1972 280SE.
“It smelled like old wool and vinyl, which is just such a typical Mercedes smell,” he fondly recalled.
That nostalgic memory would remain Purselle’s sole impression of the German marque until college. As a mechanical engineering major at Georgia Tech he had plans on helping design cars. But then he became friends with someone whose father owned the oldest independent Mercedes-Benz repair shop in Atlanta.
“After my junior year I took a summer job working there, fell in love with the Mercedes-Benz, and never returned to engineering school.”
And by Matt’s reckoning at least four previous generations of Purselles had been entrepreneurs in various endeavors; so it was only fitting that in 1999 he bought Classic Repairs, a three-bay repair shop in Decatur, Ga., and turned it into …
