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A New Years Gift from Down South

 

The C-Class was traditionally the cheap Mercedes, but the CLA has taken that title, so has the new W205 C Class been sufficiently upgraded?

The exterior looks vastly improved.  When I sent a quick photo of the car to fellow C&O editor Stephen, he wondered how Herb Chambers of Boston could possibly afford S Class loaners.  So the car looks good, I’ve already established that in just 54 words.  The details are what should truly differentiate the C Class from the CLA, aside from the drivetrain.  Car & Other will always provide alternative content and reviews, turn to other click-bait on BuzzFeed and TTAC if you need the 0-60 times.

The exterior looks great, but now wears the ubiquitous hood cutline across the front.  This detail hardly deserves attention anymore because even the facelifted E Class has one on the sport model.  More notable is the well fitting, but poorly designed window-surround trim.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the detail was designed by an intern phoning in from Berlin, rather than the engineers from Stuttgart.  The curves don’t meet well and the base piece has a flat end that extends beyond the rounded vertical piece.  Ostensibly minor problems like this is emblematic of a less-than true Mercedes Benz.  Audi has always been king of well integrated window treatment, and continues to be.

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The exterior lighting on the car is impressive, only the high-beams are halogen.  I’m convinced that every other bulb in the entire vehicle is LED, which gives an impressive, high quality appearance.  Mercedes thinks so, as well. Every exterior lighting assembly has a small Mercedes-Benz inscription to remind the casual passer-by with a magnifying glass that this isn’t just a Corolla.

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Another notable feature that rarely makes it through the conversion to US DOT spec is the left/right parking light settings.  In Germany and presumably other EU countries, owners that park their vehicles on the side of the road are expected to leave the corresponding side parking lights on.  From my time in Berlin, I’ve only seen one road user using this feature and in the US, this will only serve to befuddle the drivers.  Even if this function, won’t every be used properly (along with the LED rear fog lights), the lights look cool.  The LED tube lighting pioneered on BMWs and Saabs look amazing during the day and at night.

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Open the hood, and not only are there dual gas struts to hold open the hood, but there are also dual latches and dampening springs.  People complain about automakers hiding the engine under plastic covers and fake intakes. Mercedes is guilty of this, but wastes no resources in ensuring the hood will open and close properly for hundreds of thousands of miles.  Certainly this area was not left to the over-clubbed intern in Kreuzberg.

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The mixed bag of quality on the exterior continues on the inside.  The design is equally as impressive as the exterior, but the brushed “aluminum” and chrome should be classified as an invasive species.  Every feature and component is accented with a band of plastic aluminum, from the iPad imitating COMMAND screen to the lowly parking pass holder situated above the headlight controls.  Interestingly, the headlight controls have no “off” position, which is a first for any car I’ve experienced.  The default position is “Auto”, and where the “Off” position usually resides are the controls for the left/right side parking lights mentioned earlier.  And there is even more euro-strangeness with the lights.  The foglight controls adjacent to the headlight control actually corresponds the the rear fogs, as this car doesn’t feature front fogs.  Maybe this Herb Chambers loaner was originally destined for a dealership in Berlin, not Boston. 

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The single most egregious quality disappointment on the interior isn’t the plasti-chrome invasion or the strange headlight controls, but the plastic sun visors.  Yes, plastic sun visors.  What is generally reserved for sub-20k hatchbacks is now a conspicuous addition to a $48k C Class.   This one item serves to ruin the experience of the C Class for me.  I would condescendingly snort at a CLA for using plastic visors, but an honest-to-goodness longitudinally engined, rear wheel drive based C Class deserves much better.  I guess wrapping them in fabric like any self respecting German would do is too much for the plant workers in Alabama. 

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With this previous statement, the review concludes.  The new C Class may look like an S Class on the inside and out, and while the engineers did their best to over-engineer like it is still the 80s, the new-age C Class really is just another “optimally engineered” car.  The dual strut hood and LED lighting create a glimmer of quality that was never there in the previous C Class or current CLA, but cannot fool the most astute critics at Car and Other.  So this review ends on a negative note, but despite all my complaints, I still like the C Class.  It just looks right, and the details can never be fully flushed, whether it is a W126 or a W205. 

-Trevor Gotfredson

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Storytime!

Sit back and enjoy the tale of how I stopped thinking it was cool to slide around blind corners in other people’s cars.   

After my senior year of high school I spent the summer working for my dad’s architecture firm with a friend who for the sake of this story I will call Gerald.  There, we did simple stuff like draft plans using CAD and deliver widgets to building sites.  Halfway though the summer, however, we took on a much more exciting responsibility.  One of my dad’s clients visited seasonally and he asked my father to take care of his summer car while that car’s accompanying house was renovated.  The car in question was a 1992 Lexus SC300 in 90’s green and with a 5-speed manual and only 50,000 miles.

When we learned of this, Gerald and I concocted an excuse to drive it.  Well, leaving a car in one place for a few months is, uh, bad for the engine and tires. The car needs to run every now and then to, you know, to breath.  My dad initially refused, but he eventually asked the owner if he would mind the driven to stay fresh.  Happily, the man from New Jersey had no problem with the idea.  So we would take the Lexus out for about ten or fifteen minutes at a time and then bring it back, put the cover on, and make an entry into our very serious looking maintenance spreadsheet.    

The car itself was wonderful.  Its whole construction reeked of the world dominating ambition that Toyota, and perhaps Japan as a whole, seemed to have in the 1980’s.  Two huge hinges, probably pilfered from the Black Gate of Mordor, held each door in place.  The roof didn’t even have a cut line; instead it was one flush piece of steel.  In short, it seemed invincible.  The straight six sounded like what I imagined auto journalists meant when they reminisced about old naturally aspirated BMWs, aggressive without being juvenile.  The steering was light, crisp and generally free of slop.  Being from the 90’s meant that the steering wheel was thin and shaped as a steering wheel, not the two inch thick rubber donut you see on that arcade game with speedboats.  The driver sat in an unusually reclined position and while headroom was tight, the controls met the hand naturally.  The leather wasn’t very convincing.  The shifter vibrated at idle and had a very light action, but the clutch take-up felt pretty accurate.

After a while, driving the SC300 felt perfectly natural.  l figured this was because the car used a straight six and had rear wheel drive-you know the correct layout.  This all changed late one Tuesday afternoon.  The night before I had psyched myself for the drive by watch YouTube videos related to that particular Lexus model.  One exciting feature had some totally sweet bros put a Corvette engine in theirs and fling it sideways around a track.  So with those guys in mind, I went to work and counted down the minutes until I would drive the SC300.  Thunderstorms precluded driving for most of the afternoon, but by the early evening the skies had cleared somewhat and we were off. 

Near the office is a twisty little road with a speed limit of about 25 or 30 mph.  One needn’t drive very fast to have fun there but many do anyway.  Gerald and I brought the car here and gradually built courage through the still damp corners.  After a few minutes I was getting the tail out just a teeny bit on the larger bends.  In retrospect, this alone was quite dumb.  The car was exactly as old as I am and it’s 15 inch tires probably weren’t much younger, but such reasonable thoughts never crossed my mind.  After ten or so minutes, we decided to head back and I drove.  Midway through the last bend, I suddenly remembered that drifting video.  For just a moment I thought about how I probably wouldn’t drive such car again, and that I might as well make my very last go round interesting.  I decided to give the throttle a little extra shove.

In all honesty, what happened next probably lasted about three seconds, but in my mind it took quite a bit longer.  Gandalf the White described a similar feeling in The Lord of the Rings “Darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time… The stars wheeled overhead, and every [second] was as long as a life age of the earth.”  Aside from the darkness and stars bit, that sounds about right and the I’ll retell my version as best I can.  I pressed on the gas and nothing happened, then the steering became weightless and the tail swung way way too far out.  By the time that registered, the car and I were facing what the media likes to call a “wooded area”, but the vehicle as a unit was still traveling forward down the road. This can’t be happening because this isn’t my car so it if it was happening, it would be very bad.  So I am obviously a videogame right now. Then I heard a bang and felt myself spinning. Did I just crash? Nooo of course not.  I don’t crash. That would be irresponsible.  The whole affair felt like a dream but at the very end I felt a thud.  The SC had slid sideways, hit a rock with its bumper, was lifted by that rock, and spun 270 degrees from its starting point.  No way this is an accident it still seems like a dream, oh whats that I feel? I guess we just landed.  I guess this really happened.  Uh oh.

Gerald and I sat in silence for a couple of seconds.  I opened the door door and surveyed the wreckage. I expected the entire front end to have caved in, like one of those NHTSA medium speed crash tests, not the full 45 mph ones but not the 5 mph ones either.  The fascia looked pretty bad but had nowhere near the damage I was expecting.  There was an angry looking gash along the bumper and a lot of grass and dirt stuffed in the grill.  The whole front cover looked a bit loose as well, but aside from that nothing was terribly amiss.  I began to wonder where all the energy went and where that bang had come from.  Maybe I was just imagining things.  Before I could answer, another car appeared.  Gerald and I exchanged glances and jumped back in, avoiding eye contact with the driver and praying the engine would start again.  Luckily it did and we sidled a few hundred yards to the nearest pull off.

I got a much better picture of the damage here.  Unfortunately that loud bang turned out to be real; under the hood was a huge dent where the AC compressor should have been.  That jolt had come when the car’s compressor smacked a rock which was embedded on the side of the road and seemed to be about the size R2-D2’s “head”, though a good bit more jagged.  This was going to be expensive.  I felt awful, like I had hit a person or something.  After all, this wasn’t a Nissan Rogue from Alamo but my dad’s client’s SC300.  It was based on the LS300 sedan, which was one of those rare cars designed simply to be “the best” period.  Since this was the coupe version of “the best”, it was supposed to be rare as well-you know a “halo” car or whatever.  

To be continued…