The new Mercedes C-Class is a tremendous advancement on its predecessor. It is also clearly a class leader, yet there are some small niggles here and there, writes Kushan Mitra
Somewhere down the road while driving the new C-Class, you just realise just how cocooned you are in a modern luxury car. The music is playing out through the brilliant sound system, the car is moving along with city traffic but you feel completely isolated from the outside world, obviously you are paying attention to the road. Yet, when the car finds some open road you can depress the accelerator a bit and the C-Class can start moving like scalded rabbit.
But the thing is that the C220 CDI — like its main rivals in the category, the BMW 320d and the Audi A4 2.0TDI — produces near as makes no difference 170 horsepower. In terms of driving performance, acceleration and to an extent handling as well, there is really little to distinguish between the three cars. The BMW might be a better handling car, the Audi might accelerate best. Yet, this is really about trying to find a needle in a haystack, a very large haystack, with your hands tied behind your back.
So performance is not the Mercedes C200 CDI’s selling point, yes it can be fun to drive and if you can find a nice, empty twisty hilly road it can be a pleasure to go apex to apex. But most likely many of these cars will be driven inside a city at regular city speeds. And this is where the C-Class shines, because it is such a comfortable car.
The new C-Class borrows heavily from the brand new S-Class that was introduced over a year ago. This includes Mercedes new design language, the front end looks similar to the S-Class and its smaller siblings the A-Class and ClA-Class. But in terms of exterior style, Mercedes did seem to just make the S-Class smaller. But that is the way with German luxury cars from all brands, the smaller cars just emulate the bigger ones.
What is crucial though is that Mercedes seems to have also emulated the interiors of the new S-Class, which is a superb thing because the new S-Class interiors are utterly brilliant. This includes adopting the new ‘COMAND’ car-driver computer interface system which is a marked improvement from the previous generation, including a much better navigation display.
However, Mercedes has also fitted the new C-Class with a touch interface above the rotary wheel. The idea one assumes is to make the rotary wheel redundant in a few years, however irritatingly because we in India drive on the right-hand side of the road, the touchpad is on the left. This is a great thing for left-handed people and those who can manage fine movements with the fingers of their left hand. However, like most people in the world, your writer is a right-handed person and other than basic operations such as forwarding a song or changing radio stations is a very frustrating experience.
Yes, the touchpad has handwriting recognition that would make entries for navigation or even ‘writing out’ an SMS or a Facebook update going forward ought to be possible. And in left-hand drive countries, maybe this will be a great feature. In right-hand drive countries such as India, the UK, Japan and Australia among others, all countries where Mercedes sell a lot of cars. So either they need to figure out what to do with the touchpad in such markets or remove it. The touchpad is a standard option on the higher-specified variants of the C-Class and will likely become standard across all Mercedes cars within the next few years.
There is one other problem with the C-Class, the fact that it isn’t necessarily the best small sedan from Mercedes themselves. Over the years the C-Class has grown bigger, much bigger. It is in terms of interior space as big as a E-Class from a decade ago, and it is just as powerful. And Mercedes themselves seem to have realised this, which is why a few weeks ago they launched the new ClA-Class. Which in terms of size, is more of a successor to Mercedes’ old C-Class, now out of production. Of course, this is all part of Mercedes-Benz’ global gameplan to have a car in every category, thanks to the notion of platform-based building.
Which is not a great thing for car writers because Mercedes’ line-up is confusing. Because Mercedes used to have a regular sedan, a large sedan and a very large sedan. Now they have a small hatchback (A-Class), a larger hatchback (B-Class), a sedan (ClA-Class), a not-so-large sedan (C-Class), a large sedan (E-Class) and a very large sedan (S-Class). And this is before getting to Mercedes’ Sports Utility Vehicles, which over the next 24 months will be sliced and diced to fit every possible niche.
And that is the thing with the new C-Class, which also has a C220 petrol model costing between Rs39.9 lakh and Rs42.9 lakh, it is a significant amount more expensive than the ClA-Class. Yes, the ClA 200CDI is a bit smaller, a bit less powerful and it has front-wheel drive. It also does not have as nice an interior as the C-Class. But, the old C-Class was Mercedes-Benz India’s best-selling self-driven car, and while the new C-Class is a brilliant car to drive, it seems more suited to lounge in the back in. The ClA is the car that people who drive themselves most of the time should buy.