I’m still trying to figure out what the separate little compartment just ahead of the armrest compartment is for.  It’s about the size of a pack of cards, but a tad thicker  It’s a bit too short for my iPod or iPhone, and I doubt most other cell phones would fit in it either.  But it’s just right I think, to hold a pack of cigarettes.  The car has a real ash tray and cigarette lighter in it…a thing that most other car makers are phasing out now it looks like.  Are Germans that obsessive smokers that they put compartments in their automobiles specifically to hold their cigarette packs?

[New Car Love Alert…]

So I’m out of the break-in period, and taking the car a little more and more into its upper ranges.  Bear in mind that for years, decades, I’ve been a stick driver and absolutely hated automatics.  Also, that I’ve never owned a car with anything under the hood that could even remotely be called a high performance engine.

• I’ve finally encountered the issue people are complaining about out there, with the new seven speed automatic down shifting too aggressively.  But I’ve been taking Traveler slowly up and down the speedometer and tach and learning how it behaves and I think I know what the problem is.  Most American drivers, especially drivers of my generation, learned on automatics that made you stomp down on the accelerator in order to down shift.  You do that in this car and it will behave like it thinks you’re doing some kind of emergency maneuver and race down the gears when that’s not what you want.  In this car, in normal driving, when you just want to rapidly pass someone or accelerate out of a situation, you don’t stomp down on the gas pedal.  You have to back off your old habits a tad, learn to just firmly press the accelerator forward.  The car will figure out what you want and down shift in a more normal manner.  And then…trust me…that speedometer needle will climb like you won’t believe.  The car won’t slam you back in your seat…it’s a luxury sedan not a Lamborghini…but the effect of the smooth urgency with which it takes you into loose-your-license territory is…amazing.  At least to me.  I guess that’s what high compression, plus variable valve timing does.  Which is why it only drinks expensive premium gas.  I’ve driven big V-8s that had less authority then this six.  But they were 1970s V-8s.  I can’t imagine what the engines Mercedes puts in its S class cars nowadays must feel like.  Anyway…the transmission will behave itself, but you need a calm foot on the pedal.  You don’t stomp the pedal down.  Just ask it politely.  It’ll deliver.
• I’ve never owned a car before, that was actually and seriously designed to be driven at speeds above 100 miles per hour, and taking Traveler up the speedometer makes me feel like I’m suddenly in a completely different world now. The car is way too comfortable for my own good at speeds well in excess of anything you’re legally allowed to drive on any highway in the lower 48.  You know you’re going fast, it just doesn’t feel like you’re driving beyond the limits of the car, or even close.  Road noise is minimal, the car doesn’t feel squirrelly, but tight on the road and perfectly, happily content.  If anything, it feels like it’s waiting for me to ask it for more.  That’s scary.  I feel like I really need to take a course in high speed driving.  There are places that offer it.  Not that you’re supposed to be doing that on the highways, or that I plan on doing that.  Even if it were legal, American driving habits would make an Autobahn here much, much too dangerous.  But like Stan Lee said, with great power comes great responsibility.  The tires may be rated for those speeds, but the driver isn’t.  That’s a whole different kind of driving.  I need to learn it.
• I’m getting a tad over 25 miles per gallon average.  It’s not awful, but not great either.  I’m used to getting in the low thirties, and that’s on regular.  Now I have to buy premium and while my bill hasn’t skyrocketed, it’s something I have to pay attention to more now.  Figure my total gasoline expenses have about doubled.  But as work is just a mile down the road, even if I drove it all the time, which I don’t, my gas bill was never all that much to start with.  Right now my usage is high because I’m still in new car love and I’m busy driving Traveler here and there after work just about every day, just for the shear pleasure of driving it as well as the practical matter of getting to know it.  At some point that’ll taper off and then the big cost will be when I take it on road trips.  This year my drive to Memphis, Topeka, Portland and Oceano and back cost me about $725 in gas.  Double that isn’t an easy figure to swallow all in one go.  So I have to make a point to save up for it.  I put a hundred bucks or so every month into a road trip kitty and I can still do them.  But I just can’t petty cash my gasoline anymore like I used to be able to.  Now I have to pay attention to it.  I have three savings accounts scattered here and there that I’ve just been putting random spare cash into.  I’ll make one of these my road trip kitty and then just use it for road trip gas and miscellaneous expenses.

Peterson Toscano is worried I won’t come out of my new car.  Not to worry Peterson.  Someday.  Someday.

• My sideview mirrors are heated.  Something in the pods is generating enough heat on them that they’re clear of fog before I’ve even finished wiping the windows off in the mornings.  Not sure yet if they’re heated by a stream of air from the car’s climate control system or there’s a small electric heater in the pods.  The reason I’m wondering if it’s a stream of air is because…
• …I discovered last night that my glove compartment has a little vent in it I can open to let air from the climate control system in.  I’m assuming that’s to keep things like the iPod at reasonable temperatures while they’re in there.  I was plugging the iPod in for a drive when I decided to find out what that odd little knob at the top of the glove compartment did.  So I twisted it and lo and behold a stream of air started coming out.  Then I noticed the markings on the knob were similar to the ones that open and close the dashboard and rear seat air vents.  How obsessive do you have to be to put a variable air vent in the glove compartment?  I should check to see if the armrest compartment has one of these too.
• I’m not as well-to-do as the price of this car might suggest.  My sales paperwork says Traveler cost me 45 grand.  That’s after taxes and tags.  The actual price of the car itself was about 39 grand, and with 14 grand trade-in for my Accord, I’m not financing that much more then the amount I financed on the Accord (which I bought with all the bells and whistles), back in 2005.  But let me tell you…driving a forty-five thousand dollar automobile down the road, does make you a more careful driver.  It could be amusing to connect me to an EKG and watch my heart trying to leap out of my throat whenever someone cuts me off or pulls out right in front of me.  And I am a way less aggressive driver now then I was a couple months ago.  It had never occurred to me that this might be why luxury sedan owners all dive like wusses.
• There seem to be a lot of reasons for me to drive Traveler somewhere lately.  Oh…I’m short on bread.  Gotta drive to the SuperFresh.  Oh…looks like I’m out of stamps.  Better go to the post office.  I wonder how much color the trees have in them now around Rockville?  Better go look…

[New Car Love Alert…]

Some years ago I was kicked back on the sofa, idly watching a chase on one of those police video car chase programs. Some thief had stolen a big, hugely expensive four door luxury sedan, and the cops were chasing it all over, I think it was southern California, trying to get it to stop. But this wasn’t just any old rich man’s status tank they were pursuing, it was a Mercedes S class, and I watched with a little guilty pleasure as that thing consistently out ran, out cornered and generally out maneuvered all the souped up Ford police cars trying to catch it. And the cops knew what it was they were chasing that night, and that they were going to have a hard time with it. You heard it on the police radio chatter as the pursuit went on.

It was guilty fun sitting there watching a big stogy luxury sedan blast down the freeway, just walking away from the cop car behind it at speeds well in excess of a hundred, then suddenly seem to just turn on a dime, at speed, and blast off in a completely different direction while its pursuers were skidding around trying to change course. In my defense, I’ll say I was also angry for the owner of the car. It was an outrage that such a fine vehicle was being recklessly manhandled by someone who couldn’t have cared less about its engineering qualities, so much as the money he thought he was going to get for stealing it. I think the cops eventually had to use spikes to get it to stop.

I probably was driving Aya, my 1993 Geo Prism, back then. I was happy with that car. But when that TV chase ended I know my heart probably sighed a little. There’s why I want a Mercedes…

Back when I was a teenager, and first fell in Mercedes love, the company had an advertising slogan that went, Engineered Like No Other Car In The World. Okay, take that apart. Like any ad slogan it seems to say a lot, while actually saying very little. Of course you nitwit it’s engineered like no other car in the world…Every car maker does the engineering their own way. The goddamned Trabant can say it’s engineered like no other car in the world too, and count your blessings for it!

But what you were meant to get from that slogan, was that Mercedes put engineering excellence foremost…that in addition to fine materials and workmanship, you were also buying a work of high automobile engineering art. Here’s a typical Mercedes ad from 1971, around the time I was starting to get Mercedes love bad.

Now most cars these days should be able to perform on the test track pretty much like that Mercedes sedan in that ad did back then. But back in 1971, back when most cars sold in America still had solid rear axles and rear leaf springs, it would have been remarkable to see Any car doing that, let alone a large four door luxury sedan. Put a 1971 Lincoln Continental on that test track and see what you get.

The image of the Mercedes-Benz was that it was a stodgy, boxy looking German luxury car that was way over engineered, over powered, and could out maneuver any American sports car on the road, let alone American full sized sedans. And Mercedes pioneered passenger safety engineering in a day when the U.S. automakers were still dragging their heels on shoulder harnesses and five mile an hour bumpers. You knew the Mercedes would protect you in an accident better then any other car. But you also knew that even the biggest and most luxurious Mercedes were powerful and nimble enough to help you avoid the accident in the first place

That was 1971. It’s a measure of how much trust in their engineering Mercedes lost during the 1990s, that their new slogan is Because We Promised You A Mercedes Benz.

I actually could have bought a Mercedes a couple years ago, when Aya, after driving it more then two hundred thousand miles, began telling me that it was time to get a new car. That was February 2005. And I did look at the C class then, and I didn’t like it, and I wasn’t ready yet to start trusting Mercedes again, especially after they’d decided to merge with Chrysler. I wouldn’t trust a Chrysler motor any further then I could throw it. But then they got rid of Jürgen Schrempp, divorced from Chrysler, and came out with an entirely new from the ground up C class that I thought was drop dead beautiful the moment I laid eyes on one. And when I sat in one, I thought, This is Me.

I’m looking under the hood of my new Mercedes the other day, still drinking it all in, still in new car love, and I’m gawking at these big ass steel struts I see jutting forward along each side of the engine toward the radiators. I’ve seen front end frame members before but nothing like these. They look more like they belong on a small truck then a compact four door sedan. And I’m remembering how Mercedes engineers, who seem to be back in control now, had been rethinking, fine tuning, their crash crumple zone technology. Mercedes invented the crumple zone, where parts of the car are designed to give way in a crash and absorb the forces of impact. They were doing that back in the 1950s. But now with supercomputer modeling technology, they’re managing the forces of impact a tad more precisely now, and a few strategic parts of the car are being beefed up to Not crumple, but withstand impact, and transmit the force elsewhere, more effectively around the passenger compartment and away from the passengers.

And I’m standing there gawking at these honking big steel frame members and my eyes wander around the engine, in its own compartment within a compartment, with gaskets that seal to the hood and keep the engine heat and fumes away from the other under the hood systems, which also have their own little sub compartments, and all the stuff that connects everything together which is more robust then it needs to be, and almost arrogantly precise. And I feel the smile coming back to my face again. This is what I wanted a Mercedes for. I didn’t spend all this money for an empty status symbol.

Over at the LA Times, Dan Neil’s review of the new C class begins thusly…

On average, the angriest e-mails I get are from former Mercedes-Benz owners on the occasion of my saying something nice about the company’s products…

Allow me to gloss: "I can’t believe you raved about the [insert gaudy hunk of German schteel here]. I bought a Mercedes a few years ago and it was a total piece of [insert colorful metaphor here]. I took it back to the dealer [exponential figure times] and finally got sick of them looking at me like I was speaking a foreign language [English?]. So, when did you go on the company payroll, you toadying, Hun-loving shill?"

What energizes these missives is a sense of betrayal, and in a perverse way – and wholly unwelcome, I’m sure – the galled, bug-eyed fury of disappointed buyers is a tribute to the expectations attached to the Mercedes-Benz brand…

Just so. And Neil’s initial impression of this new Mercedes is the same as mine…

So, is the new C-class – in the deathless prose of the ad – a Mercedes-Benz? Well, it feels like one. The moment you touch the door handle, you register the lubricated heft, the mantle-of-the-Earth solidity of Mercedes’ biggest and best products. Fall into the stiff, low-bolster seats and the familiar comes at you in waves: The optional COMAND nav/audio/vehicle controller interface is the same as in the S-class, only the central rotary knob is a smaller, knurled aluminum wheel. Much of the switchgear is identical to that of the higher-end vehicles. I was fairly unexcited about the C-class interior until I saw it in person; the grade of materials is richer and more appealing than it looks in photos. This is an organized, serious interior with lots of evident deliberation behind it. Sightlines are excellent, and it’s especially nice to be able to see the hood stretching out with small audacity like the S-class.

I’ve heard complaints about the amount of plastic in the new C class interior. I invite the critics to compare with the Lexus, Acura, and Infinity. A couple years ago I flew into Memphis and rented an Infinity G35 four door and while it was nice, it was more loaded with plastic then the new C, and it also felt cheap to the touch. I could close my eyes and think I was touching the dash of a Chevy. Not so in my C300. The stuff Mercedes is using is a thicker gage and feels on the one hand much more solid and substantial to the touch, and yet on the other soft and supple when you run your fingers across its surface. It’s interesting stuff. I used to work in a custom plastic fabrication shop, and I’m a little familiar with the various kinds of plastics and how their formed and worked. This stuff Mercedes is using isn’t cheap. Just less expensive then all leather sewn upholstery. You want that, go buy an S class. You want more wood and less plastic, buy the E class.

We C class owners are probably mostly folks who can just barely afford the C, let alone the E or S. We’re not rich, we’re middle class Mercedes aficionados and we aren’t spending this kind of money all for nice leather and wood trim. You buy a Mercedes for its engineering as much as anything else. And I think Mercedes is really back on track here with this new C. Again, from Neil…

You can call it lines of force, graviton waves or celestial harmonics, but there is something deeply Benz-like about the C-class’ interior ambiance. It’s not simply the deeply muffled interior and wind noise levels, but the timbre of those sounds. The thing sounds like it should have European air woofling through the air ducts.

The solidness of a thing’s build makes itself felt everywhere. Whether its a house or a car. Some folks just notice that sort of thing more then the surface trimmings. It’s not that all the little details of trim and finish aren’t important, but they’re no substitute for quality engineering. A house should be solidly built because it needs to be a house first, and only then a showpiece. A state of the art kitchen can’t make a house without a good foundation and a roof that won’t last any better then a trailer. You buy a car like a Mercedes-Benz, because first you want the best Car, then you want all the nice trimmings to go with it.

In the C class, because of its price point, some compromises have to be made between trim and engineering. I think I speak for a lot of Mercedes C class owners when I say that I’d rather the engineering came first because that’s what I’m mostly buying. Yes, I adore the 450 watt Harmon-Kardon stereo system. Yes…I really really like the fact that the wood trim in the passenger compartment is Real burled walnut. No..I really don’t mind that there isn’t as much of it in there as in the E class passenger compartment. So long as my C class drives with that same, solid, deeply Benz-like ambiance. So long as it’s really engineered like no other car in the world.

I’m out of the break-in period now, and gradually letting the car go a little faster, corner a little tighter, to see what’s in there. The other day I had it out a stretch of freeway with no other traffic and a good long line of sight. A good place I figured, to give it a little nudge forward and see what happens. Well what happened was the car happily jumped up to a hundred in no time and felt like it was doing about seventy. I quickly backed off. Damn! It was smooth, it was quiet, and unlike a lot of cars I’ve driven way too fast for my own good, it didn’t make my knuckles go white with the sensation I was right on the razor’s edge. In fact the only scary thing about it was it felt like there was a lot more in the car where that came from. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to find where this car runs out of steam.

That’s what buying a car made for the Autobahn gets you.

I got my first alert from the Mercedes this morning.  Yes…I’ve been driving it to work, even though I can just walk it.  Put it down to new car love.  In the state I’m in, I’d drive it to the mailbox on the corner to post a letter.

Anyway…I was wondering how the driver alert system worked.  The speedometer has a central digital display and can show the driver all kinds of information about the car, and you can drill through a bunch of menus to tell it what you want it to display while you’re driving.  Right now I just have it set to show me the regular and trip odometers, but it can show me everything from the direction I’m traveling and the name of the street I’m on to how many mile’s per gallon I’m getting.  Supposedly, that’s where all the car’s various system alerts appear too.

It was cold this morning here in Baltimore, and I let the car warm up while I squeegeed the dew off the windows.  I’d tossed my jacket in the back seat but didn’t properly close the door.  When I finished with the windows I tossed the squeegee back in the trunk and got in the car.  As soon as I started driving down the road a "ding" like that sound in an airliner when the Fasten Your Seat Belts sign comes on, came out of all twelve speakers of the stereo system and the entire central display in my speedometer lit up red.  There was an overhead view of the car drawn in the middle of it, with the back driver’s side door open.  I think there may have been a warning too across the bottom that a door had been left ajar, but I didn’t read it because the sight of the graphic was enough.  I pulled right back over and got out and shut the door.

Nice.  It got my attention but it didn’t slap me in the face doing it.  Some cars are just plain rude about that sort of thing, and some are so polite about it you never even notice the little red warning light on the display until way after its too late.  The Mercedes will tell me things like when a light has burned out, or my tire pressure is low, or when and what routine mantainance I need to have done, so I was wondering how much of a nag it might get to being.  But this is good.

  
So I took a drive in my new car last weekend, up to Stroudsburg PA, to visit an old grade school friend.  It was beautiful weather for it, particularly Sunday morning and afternoon.  The skies were clear and blue and the trees in the eastern Pennsylvania mountains had their autumn colors on.  I went to watch my friend Glenn, who does sound for the Sherman Theater, manage a 34 band show.  Afterward, he invited me up to a mountain resort lodge Sunday, where he does Chef duty, to see his kitchen operation and have lunch.  So I not only got fed well, I got an opportunity to take the Mercedes down some lovely, winding mountain backroads, just as the leaves were turning

The car showed me that it was everything I’d hoped for in a touring sedan. The road’s rough patches were smoothed out nicely, and yet it never once lost that solid Mercedes road feel.  As I was still in the break-in period I didn’t push the car too much up the grades or around the bends, but it behaved nicely and with a sense that there was plenty of power and cornering ability I’d yet to tap. The driver’s seating was firm and comfortable and I drove back to Baltimore from the lodge for four and a half hours straight without feeling any fatigue.  I always had a good sense of the road around me, and traffic, as I drove.  The sideview mirrors on this car are huge compared to the Honda I just had, especially in the vertical axis and adjusted properly there were no blind spots to worry about.  I always felt that I had a complete grasp of the highway conditions around me.  The car hides nothing from you, and yet it smooths everything out and you feel relaxed and alert as you drive.  Every control you might want is handy, every gage and display readable at a quick glance, and the car responds easy and certain to your every touch of the steering wheel and pedal; yet you always have a sure, solid feel for the road.  Best drive I’ve ever owned, hands down.

A few times I had to accelerate quickly to get past some rude drivers.  I didn’t stomp down on the accelerator, but instead manually down shifted by tapping the shift lever sideways.  The car down shifted very smoothly, and without any appreciable motor roar, and though I was still trying to keep the revs down during the break-in period, the car gave me all the power I needed to handle those situations.  The v-6 was smooth and amazingly quiet the whole time.  In part probably because it practically lives in its own little compartment within the hood compartment.  Acceleration just happened.  I’ve heard complaints about the new 7 speed transmission down shifting too aggressively but I never encountered that.  Probably because I was trying to keep my revs down.  But I’ll likely rely more on the shifter for that sort of control when I need it then the accelerator.  I’ve driven sticks for so long it’s almost second nature.  Not having a clutch is what I’m having to adapt to.

The stereo kept me good company all the time, the Sirius satellite signal never dropping out along the mountain roads.  I had the CD changer full and my iPod attached to the connector in the glove compartment.  The 450 watt Harmon-Kardon stereo system sounds really, really nice.  I never appreciated how a high end stereo might actually be worthwhile inside an automobile.  But in a car as quiet inside as the Mercedes, it’s actually worth having.

About the iPod adapter: Connecting an iPod to a high end car stereo like the Harmon-Kardon, you really know that it’s not a high end playback device.  The difference between it and the CD player, and for that matter the Sirius signal, sometimes becomes painfully clear when listening to a song that sounded just fine in the ear buds, only to have the Harmon-Kardon mercilessly expose its every audio flaw.  I have some songs on the iPod that I’d ripped long ago with a low end PC mp3 converter and I could instantly tell which ones those were listening to them played through on the car stereo.  What surprised me was how variable the sound quality on the stuff I’d bought from iTunes was.  Some of it matched the quality of the Sirius signal easily.  Some of it sounded dull and flat.  There were variations in sound level that forced me to turn up the volume on the Harmon-Kardon and then I heard how noisy the iPod’s circuitry was.

The Nav system gave me a good sense of the backroads I was traveling along, neatly augmenting the directions to the Lodge, and then later back to the Interstate, that my friend Glenn gave me.  I have never had a problem finding my way from one end of this country to the other using paper road maps, and until I saw the Nav system on a friend’s Acura in operation, I’d always figured them to be for folks who couldn’t find their way to their own front door without help.  But seeing the Acura’s Nav system, it occurred to me that it could be helpful to have a roadmap display on the dash, showing me exactly where I am, so I’m not always having to pull off the highway and check my road atlas if I get a bit bewildered.  What I discovered last weekend is that a Nav system really helps when you’re driving through a knot of highway interchanges that you’re unfamiliar with.  And on long drives down the highway, it gives you plenty of warning when your next turn or exit is coming up, or when the highway is splitting off up ahead, and you need to be in the left or right lane.  That’s really handy.  

On the way back home from Stroudsburg, the Nav system guided me easily through the highway knots around Harrisburg.  I barely had to pay attention to the highway signs.  I just watched the traffic around me, which was moderately heavy, and listened to my invisible co-pilot’s directions.  It was really nice having it there.

The only irritating downside to the Nav system I found, is that if you decide to pull off the highway for gas or snacks it quickly turns into a nag, frantically telling you to turn around, Now, and get back on course.  It thinks you’ve made a wrong turn and it’s trying to be helpful and get you back on track again.   But it’s really annoying when all you want to do is get gas and take a bladder break.  I learned to quickly flip through the Nav menu to the Cancel Route Guidance menu selection.  There should be a Nav system guide pause button somewhere on the steering wheel.  Of course, I could probably cancel the Nav system guidance with a voice command, but I’m still struggling with the voice command system because…

…There are way too many voice commands to easily remember. What’s good about a well designed menu system is that you don’t have to remember everything, just the top level stuff. Then you drill down to what you want.  The Voice Command system doesn’t work that way, and I’m still trying to figure out how it Does work.  For instance, when I’m in the Nav system, I can say "Radio" and the radio will come on, but I’m always forgetting how to get the satellite music system on. Is the command "Sirius", or "Satellite" or "Satellite Radio"…???  Sitting here writing this without the manuals to look at, I’m still forgetting it.  I’m sure in time I’ll have it all down pat, but for now it’s very annoying to always be giving a voice command that the Command system doesn’t understand, and then trying another one and another one and then just giving up and going through the video screen menus with the joystick instead.

Luckily, with the console joystick, navigating through the on-screen menus is a snap. But what’s useful about the voice command system is that you can theoretically use it without having to take your eyes off the road in a situation where you don’t want to do that. So at some point I need to get better at using the voice commands. There’s an "individualization" system setup menu item that I’ll probably have to go through sometime. It’s supposed to allow you to teach the voice command recognition system your own voice. Maybe that’ll improve things.

But the drive’s the thing…much more then the bells and whistles.  And the Mercedes drives like a dream come true.  It’s no high powered sports car, and it’s no lithe little Lotus or Porche, but I’m a four door sedan kinda guy and it’s everything I ever wanted in a road trip car.  The passenger cabin is plenty roomy enough for me and some friends, and its decadently comfortable.  It’s got a big enough trunk, and it feels and handles great on the highway and the backroads.  And it’s loaded with all those passenger safety features Mercedes-Benz is famous for.  Every little detail of comfort and style in the car, also seems to have been designed with a safety feature in mind.  The wood trim inside the cabin is backed with aluminum so in an accident it won’t splinter.  The Active Body Control System will pre-tension the seatbelts if it detects an emergency maneuver.  The car came with a spare set of windshield wiper blades and a first-aid kit.  I’ll know more about the reliability factor as I go along, but initial reports on the new C300 class seem to be very good.  I could only wish it got better gas mileage and drank regular instead of premium.  But I knew what I was in for there when I bought a luxury car and I’ll just pay the extra cost.  I don’t have to drive to work every day, so the road trips really aren’t all that bad on my budget.

So as you probably know by now (because I’ve been bending everyone’s ear about it ever since October 12), I bought a brand new Mercedes-Benz.  But no…you don’t just buy a car when you buy a Mercedes…you buy into a…culture.  Sort of like another product line I’ve bought into recently…

So I drove my new car to Strudsburg PA, last weekend, to visit an old grade school friend.  In the process my car turned over its first thousand miles and I was obliged to bring it into the dealership for its complementary 1k checkup.  I did that this morning, and swear to god I’ve never been treated nicer by a car dealership in my life.  The waiting room was a nicely furnished lounge with free pastries and soft drinks, a widescreen HDTV to watch, and an Enterprise rental car office right in the lounge, in case the service department told you they’d have to keep the car for a while (I expect that if the car was still in warranty Mercedes would just give you a loaner car…they did me, no questions asked, when I traded my Accord in, but my new Mercedes wasn’t ready for delivery just yet…).  There was also a nice little Mercedes boutique shop, where you could shop Mercedes-Benz paraphernalia to your heart’s content while waiting for your car. There were the usual assortment of Mercedes-Benz approved car care products.  Polo shirts, jackets, caps, wallets, wrist watches, key fobs, umbrellas, posters…you name it. 

I bought a sharp looking little spun aluminum travel mug to go with the car.  It had the Mercedes three pointed star logo.  It was a lovely shape that seemed to go well with the look of the car I’d just bought.  I saw it and I had to have it.  I expect I’ll be experiencing that feeling a lot in the coming months, regarding Mercedes merchandise.

The guy behind the parts counter window handed my new Mercedes-Benz travel mug to me in a little box, that reminded me of something else I’d purchased not that long ago…

Oh yes…that.  The cult of Apple.  The cult of Mercedes-Benz.  Perhaps this was how initiates to the cults of the old gods once felt.  But was there merchandise they could buy…?

So far, everything I’m seeing on the reliability of the new C class is good.  This owner’s review on the Mercedes Benz Club of America C-class forum was especially heartening, since the man seems to have done the kind of long distance road trip loop I love doing…

We left Vancouver WA…went first to San Francisco for a week…then Las Vegas, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, then Monument Valley, Albuquerque, picked up the old Route 66 road through Kingman AZ, to San Diego…back to SF, then Sacramento…then home on 9/24.

Stats: 4750 miles covered [the car now has exactly 5000 miles on it], 26-28 mpg at freeway speeds, temps ranged from 40-115F, altitudes to 9000 feet.

Roads: Everything from Interstates with 75 mph limits [and actual speeds of 85], to back roads with pitted surfaces and extreme twists for miles at a time. Really smooth pavement was rare; back roads in AZ and NM were sometimes very rough. These observations are important to the next point…

The Car: Absolutely fantastic. The best part about the new car is the ride / handling compromise – very absorbent ride over every kind of surface, but handling that is noticeably better in every way over the W203. Another improvement is the larger trunk…we got everything we needed inside, and it is more useable than the previous generation in this respect. Great seats [nothing new here], very quiet, and the quickest car we’ve ever owned – passing is easy, and speed changes are mostly a matter of just thinking about it. AC was really tested during the SW part of the trip – we saw 115F in Vegas, and never less than 95F for nearly two weeks. Coolant temps never budged over 90C, the cabin was always cooled instantly after a hot sun soak, and so far the car has used no oil at all. And it’s tight – no noises inside, no squeaks or annoyances.

Issues: None. That’s right, everything works. Our car was built in Bremen in June, and carries a serial number in the 17xxx range. I knew we were running a risk – so far, so good.

Other misc observations:
-Didn’t think I’d care about the satellite radio, but now we’re hooked.
-The cruise control has a feature that I’ve never encountered on an MB before – if you speed up temporarily using the pedal, when you ease off, it doesn’t just coast back to the set speed [like every other car we’ve ever owned], but will actually apply the brakes gently to resume the old speed. Disconcerting at first, just something to get used to.
-The grade logic in the transmission is superb – whether going up hill or down, it was always doing the right thing – no hunting, and providing just the right gear to minimize brake use on down slopes. Very impressive.

Summary: The BEST CAR EVER in our household, and I’ve owned 54 cars total since 1962. DB has its act together again.

("W203" is a Mercedes chassis ID.  Apparently Mercedes folk like to identify the cars by chassis number over model designation.  I reckon that’s because Mercedes will make these not-so-minor changes in a model designation from time to time.   The new c300 is chassis W204.)

This is the kind of driving I intend to do with this car myself, and a few of his observations match with mine so far:

• The 7 speed transmission always seems to be right on the mark, regardless of the road grade.  I’ve read complaints about it downshifting too much, but I’ll just bet those are coming from folks who have theirs set on the "Sport" program and not "Comfort"  The "Sport" shifting program should be more aggressive.  I’m still in the break-in period, and Mercedes says to only use "Comfort" for now, but "Comfort" is fine.  The shifts are so smoothly done I have to watch the tach to know they’re even happening, and they happen at exactly the right moments.  I’ve not felt the car straining to accelerate even once, and the downshifts are barely felt if at all.  Acceleration just happens.
• Road handling is way beyond any car I’ve ever owned.  The ride is smooth, and yet you never loose the feel of the road, or what the car is doing.  I’m not in a position to be pushing it yet, but it seems to take corners really nicely.   I’ve driven it down a few windy Maryland Piedmont backroads and never once have I lost that solid Mercedes sedan feel in a corner or turn, no matter how much the road is undulating.  It is a pure joy to drive.  But then…it was made for the Autobahn after all…
• I encountered the same cruse control behavior he did, when I accidentally turned it on while trying to signal a lane change.  That’s all too easy on a Mercedes because the cruse control lives on a stick on the steering wheel close to the turn signal stick.  They’re easy to confuse at first.  I didn’t realize I had the cruse control on until I started down a hill and felt the car start breaking a tad to maintain speed.

And I know about how wonderful Satellite Radio is while long distance driving.  For local driving it probably wouldn’t make much difference to most drivers.  But when you’re crossing large swaths of countryside, its nice, really nice, to have a constant signal on a station you like.  Plus, unlike Clearcut Clearchannel damaged broadcast radio, satellite radio has a variety of music that’s always there.  You like bluegrass?  There is a bluegrass channel.  You like Techno-Trance?  There’s that too.  Classical?   Yup…several different flavors of it.  And so forth.  Plus…Sirius has a gay channel.  You’ve no idea how wonderful it is to have a gay channel to listen to, while you’re deep in red state territory, and the only thing on the broadcast dial is hate, hate, and more hate.

I’m taking a trip to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania Saturday to visit an old friend.  I’ll get a chance to let the Nav system direct me somewhere and give the car its first little road trip weekend.  I’m halfway through the first thousand mile break-in period, and by the time I get back the car should be ready for its complementary thousand mile check-up.

A little history… 

My first car was a blue 1973 Ford Pinto.  It had no name in my mind, other then just Pinto because the model name seemed just right for that car.  It was small, it was cute, and I loved driving it.  I was fresh out of high school and working various fresh out of high school kid jobs.  At $1997.48, the Pinto was barely affordable.  At the time, one of my uncles owned a Mercedes diesel sedan and it was a marvel.  Solid in a way none of the U.S. made cars of the 1970s could even come close to being, and yet agile on the road.  It boasted safety features the U.S. automakers kept insisting would kill their business if they had to put them on their own products.  I was a little teenage geek: where the other guys were all about Corvettes and GTOs, I was about my uncle’s Mercedes-Benz.  Everything about that car made sense to me.  But the pricetag for even the least expensive ones was well beyond what a teenage stock boy could afford.  So I just dreamed…

I ran the the Pinto for 135 thousand miles and took fanatical care of the engine to get it there.  But after ten years of driving it, everything but the engine was starting to come apart.  By 1983 it was ready for the junk yard.  A friend offered me his mom’s old 1974 Chrysler Imperial for 500 bucks and I snapped it up because in 1983 a 500 dollar car was about all I could afford.  It had a 400 cubic inch V8 and was so damn huge the dash had two ashtrays in it.  It could hold four in the front and four in the back bench seats easily, and maybe another six in the trunk.  It also had a big ass hole in the floor under the driver’s seat that I could look down at and see the asphalt going by.  I named it The Blue Whale. 

A reckless driver in a little Ford Capri hit me head on while I was waiting to turn at an intersection, and while I was grateful that I had that massive car around me when it happened, that was the end of The Blue Whale.  I was into hard times then, and could not afford to replace it.  I did public transportation to and from whatever work I could find for another four years or so. 

Then in 1991 I got some work as a software developer.  The only problem was the job was in Baltimore and I was in Rockville.  The agency I contracted through rented me a car for a couple of weeks until I got my first paycheck.  From a friend of a friend I bought a huge white 1974 Ford LTD panel wagon, another $500 junker.  It had 240 thousand miles on it, having been owned by a lady who drove it all over West Virginia for her gumball business.  I named it The Great White because Moby Dick just seemed obvious.  It had another big ass V8 engine with a collapsed lifter in it somewhere that rattled loudly.  The fabric on the inside roof was hanging down partially blocking my view out the back window, and eventually I just pulled it all off.  Thereafter the layer of foam between it and the roof started flaking off and I’d have a hair full of it by the time I got to work.  For about two years The Great White got me to Baltimore and back from the basement room I was renting in Wheaton. 

Then in 1993, more confident that I could keep earning a living doing what I was now doing, I moved to Baltimore, into my first apartment ever (I was 38 years old).  I was feeling so confident in my income as a software developer that I bought my first new car since 1973: a little green Geo Prism.  I named it Aya.  Aya was a champ, took me to California three times and carried me over two-hundred thousand miles and never once left me stranded anywhere.

By 2005 I was ready to step up a tad, and decided to go for a slightly bigger car, and more bells and whistles.  I bought a black 2005 Honda Accord sedan with all the trimmings and named it Beauty, because it was so damn beautiful.  Beauty carried me to California twice, and was, before now, the best highway car I’d ever owned.  I could drive that car for hours on end and never feel tired.  Just last July I put over eight thousand miles on it, driving first to Memphis, then to Topeka, then to Portland, then to Oceano California, and back through the southwest to Baltimore.

I fully intended when I bought Beauty, to own it as long as I’ve owned every other new car I’ve ever bought, which is to say until it had absolutely no trade-in value whatsoever.  But a friend of mine bought himself a very lovely Acura TL, and it got me to asking myself if I was ever going to get around to going for the car I always wanted or not. 

All these years I would occasionally peek into a Mercedes dealership and steal a look at the cars…particularly the low end sedans that were at least theoretically affordable.  Someday.  Maybe.  I would get a brochure and take it home and spend hours looking at it.  Two weeks ago, my Honda paid off, I peeked into a Mercedes dealership again, sat down in one of the new c300s, and thought…I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?

You don’t want to be going right back into debt again over a new car so soon after you’ve paid the one you already have off.

I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?

Your car only has 47 thousand miles on it.  Buying a new one now would be a total waste of money.

I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?

You could get ten more years out of the car you have.  Easy.

But by then I might be too old to enjoy driving a Mercedes.  I’m 54.  In ten years I’ll be 64.  And then the argument will be, can I afford to be borrowing money on a luxury car when I’m that close to retiring.

You don’t need it.  Put it away for retirement.  Put it into the house.  You just don’t need a new car.

I’m 54 years old now…Am I ever going to do this…?

I stressed over it for two weeks.  Then I did it.  I’ve named it Traveler.  One ‘l’…so as not to be confused with Lee’s horse.  I am no admirer of Mr. Lee and his Lost Cause.  The name just came to me as I was sitting in it and thinking about all the places we would go.  In German its Reisender.