So I got Traveler back from the shop today, and I’m all entranced with my car all over again.  I’m probably one of those highly annoying people who fall in love for the first time, Every Frickin Time He Falls In Love.  So if you’d rather watch pill commercials then listen to me going on about my car, you should probably skip this post. 

While my car was in the shop, and I was moping about the tire pressure monitoring system failure…Because Electrical System Problems Were Among The Most Complained About Issues With Mercedes Automobiles During Its Let’s Forget That Decade Ever Happened Decade…I wandered over to the web sites of some of those Other luxury car web sites. I wanted to look at pictures of the competition. 

My motives were not honorable.  No, I wasn’t thinking of dumping my car just because the tire pressure monitoring system went belly up and it took three days to fix it.  My Mercedes dealer did what the factory told them to do: replace the broken parts with new factory parts that were better designed then the ones that failed.  That required a modification to the wiring harness.  I discussed it with the parts department guys after I got my car back, and was told that the new design was already in all new C class Mercedes.  This is the Mercedes Way of incrementally improving a model all during its production run.  When you buy parts for a Mercedes-Benz, you can’t just order them based on the model year, you have to order parts using the car’s VIN number.   

No…I wasn’t shopping around while my eyes roved over those photos of the newest Lexus, Acuras, Lincolns and Cadillacs.  What I was doing:  Gloating.  Okay…maybe not Gloating…but something akin.  My car was in the shop for almost ten days.  I wanted reminding of why I took a chance on a Mercedes, when I could have easily bought a Lexus, which constantly gets top marks in the Consumer Reports surveys, or the Acura, which is a very close second, and several thousand dollars less costly.  Just for kicks I browsed in the Lincoln and the Cadillac web sites too.  I wasn’t in the mood to play fair.

You will notice I left BMW and Audi out of it.   Porche doesn’t make an "entry level luxury car", and neither do Rolls and Bentley and not in this lifetime will I ever own one of those.  I wanted to compare like for like in price, specs and styling:  Four door sedans in the 30 to 45k price range, styled as nicely appointed "entry level" luxury models, not those so-called sport/luxury models.  I’ve never understood the appeal of those.

An "entry level" luxury car will have more plastic in the interior and fewer über luxury items; like the adaptive seat cushions of the Mercedes S class, which adjust to keep you firmly in your seat during emergency maneuvers.  The dash will be mostly plastic of some sort, with maybe a little wood inlay…none of this all hand sewn leather stuff.  But if it’s done right, the entry level luxury car can put within the reach of your average middle-class wage earner, something a little better, a little nicer, a tad more thrilling, then the bland, mass produced, lowest common denominator average.  If your car is merely a means to get from point A to point B, then a Camry will do.  If it is your wings, your magic carpet to explore the world with, then a Lexus doesn’t really seem like an extravagance.  More like the just right companion for your journey down life’s many highways.  If you can swing it.

But Mercedes doesn’t make anything equivalent to the Camry, and where it shows isn’t in the rarefied heights of the S class, but the car they call the Baby Benz…the C class.  The C is as economy model as Mercedes is willing to go.  But if the Lexus ES benefits from all the work Toyota puts into the Camry, in terms of being able to mass produce an affordable car that is absolutely reliable, the Mercedes C class benefits from having all that expensive engineering above it.  A Lexus ES is a Camry at heart, made to a higher standard.  A C class is a smaller and more modest E class, itself a smaller more modest S class.  But they are all made to the same Mercedes standard of engineering. 

So the C gets a plastic dash instead of a leather wrapped one, but it’s still made to the same engineering standard as the S class dash.  You slide your hand across its surface and your fingers don’t tell you it’s a toy.  Vinyl upholstery is standard instead of leather, no fancy trim or optional massaging function.  But the seats though basic, are still made to the same engineering standard as the seats in the S class.  I drove from one side of the country to the other sitting in them and I’m here to tell you I never had it so comfortable.  You still get the front seat warmers and the power adjust.  You get a lot of nice extras.  But it is a plain car compared to the E, let alone the S, with a much smaller body, frame and drive train.  It is less expensive, not because it is more cheaply made, but because there simply isn’t as much of it as its bigger siblings.  It is smaller, has way fewer high tech gizmos in it, and way, way less sumptuousness.  The C is the little brother that gets all the hand me downs.  The Lexus by comparison, is a (very) high end Camry.

I don’t even like calling the C class a "luxury" car.  And…really…none of them are when you get right down to it.  At the price point we’re talking about, compromises have to be made, and a true luxury car isn’t about compromise.  And it’s here that you really see the difference: in the Mercedes, when it comes down to it, engineering wins over appearance.  The other makes really want you to think of them as luxury cars, so they go for that luxury car appearance and in the process cut corners everywhere.  The wood trim isn’t really wood, or a very low grade wood.  Likewise the aluminum trim is really just silvered plastic.  The leather in the upholstery is second or even third grade at best.  The dashes are so elegantly sculpted, but so very very cheesy to the touch.  The other makes want to be viewed as luxury cars.  The Mercedes C class wants you to think of it as a Mercedes and Mercedes has always been about engineering first.  Well…except for that Let’s Forget That Decade Ever Happened Decade…

To my mind the C is a very nice compact four door sedan, but made as well as you can make one.  The few luxury touches it has could as easily be options you’d find on any other mass produced  automobile.  It is hardly the most sumptuous thing you’ve ever seen.  It’s actually quite plain looking by comparison to the other "entry level" luxury cars.  There is nothing about the C that necessarily says Luxury Car at all.  Except…except…that uncanny feeling you get when you look at it, and especially when you sit down inside of one, that this thing is built like a damn vault…

Here’s how that all plays out in the cockpit…

The Lexus ES 350…

The Acura TL…

The Lincoln MKZ…

The Cadillac CTS…

The Mercedes-Benz C Class…

Do you see the difference?  Never mind for a moment how each of these cockpits looks.  Ask yourself how they would feel to the touch.  Which one of these interiors says to your eye that when your hands touch its surfaces it will feel something solid, or something brittle and plastic?  All that nice curvy plastic in the Lexus and Acura interiors feels about as cheap as it looks.  The Lexus in particular, looks very nice, very sumptuous.  No vinyl upholstery there.  The carpet on the floor is thick and luxurious.  But look at that dash, and the one on the Acura.  They both feel to the touch as plastic as they look.  The Cadillac is just an unmitigatedly ugly mess, in addition to feeling to the touch like it was made in a toy factory.  Only the Lincoln, surprisingly, looks anything like a solid, substantial piece of work.  But even there the eye catches little details that seem…well…cheap.  And alas, under the hood, it’s a Ford.

By comparison, the C class cockpit is almost Spartan.  Just a few nice touches of burled walnut here and there, and a little video display that hides inside the dash as if embarrassed to admit its even there in such a sparse setting.  But you sit down in one of these and you know right away how solidly built the damn thing is.

And then you start it up, and you hear a mill that sounds like you could drive it around the world several times and it would only just be broken in.  It doesn’t growl, and it doesn’t whine.  The sound of it is smooth and deep and precise and lovely.  You can tell it isn’t a sports car.  It’s a finely machined piece of 330 pound 220 horsepower steel and aluminum clockwork, as solid as everything else about the car.   I have driven big block American made V-8s that accelerated more raggedly and with less umpf then this V-6.

Well…I got mine back this afternoon.  And I’m going to take it for a ride…somewhere…anywhere…this weekend.  We’ve been apart for too damn long…