Something I try to do to Spirit once a month is clean and condition its vinyl and leather upholstery and the rubber gaskets around the doors, hood and trunk. The steering wheel is wrapped in a nice soft leather but the rest of the car is the legendary MB Tex upholstery which a lot of Mercedes affectionados will recommend over the leather because it lasts longer and is easier to clean. But something in my body oils dries up and hardens vinyl severely.
I discovered this effect back when I was a teenager, on the Koss Pro 4AA headphones I happened to love the sound of. I was always having to buy new ones every a couple years because of what my skin oils did to the ear pads. Those really nice soft vinyl ear pads would become rock hard and useless after a couple years just from contact with my skin and you couldn’t just buy new ear pads. Eventually even the cable connecting the headphones to the stereo would harden and start coming apart wherever my fingers touched it and then the headphones were finished and I would have to buy new ones.
So, decades later and two years after I bought it, the driver’s seat on my ‘C’ class, Traveler, began to harden and crack where my bare legs touched it in the summer while wearing cutoffs and when I took it in for repair my dealer said he’d never seen that happen to MB Tex before, and I remembered what my skin oils did to all the Koss headphones I used to own.
So now that I have Spirit, my ‘E’ class Dream Come True car, I do a careful cleaning and conditioning of my driver’s seat and while I’m at it I do the rest of the car too. I have it down to a routine now.
I’m just back from one of my semi-annual road trips to California, in case anyone reading this blog was wondering where the heck I went. My job at Space Telescope came with a wonderful vacation benefit, but the workload now on JWST is pretty steady and taking a couple weeks off at one go is getting harder and harder to schedule. I figured the Christmas/New Year’s break would be a good time to take a road trip to California and see my brother and give the Mercedes its first taste of the great plains and the southwest. As we get closer and closer to launch it will become very hard to schedule a long road trip west.
Time was I’d take everyone who reads this blog along with me for the ride. But these days it probably isn’t the smartest thing to let the whole world know you’re away from your house. So the blog went silent. But I’m back now…I have pictures to develop and post…I have stories to tell. But I also have unpacking to do and some settling back in to my little Baltimore rowhouse. So for now let me just jot down a few notes while the road is still fresh in my thoughts…
First, a few statistics from my car’s trip computer:
Total Miles: 6,420
Average Miles Per Gallon: 36.8
Average Speed: 60 mph
Total Driving Time: 105.59 hours
2917.4 miles from my brother’s house to mine, mostly along I-40.
I’ll total up the fuel chits later. West of the Mississippi you get highway speed limits higher than 70mph and sometimes higher than 80. You cover distance faster, but mileage suffers. Still, this is absolutely the most fuel efficient car I have ever owned and that’s saying something. My first car was a 1973 Ford Pinto with the little 1600cc engine and one barrel carburetor. It did 35mpg tops. The little Geo Prism got high 30s and so did the Honda Accord. For a car this size and this sumptuous the fuel economy is just amazing. At the end of some days on the road this trip I was pushing 39mpg. But when I hit the high mountain passages my averages went down into the low 30s.
Bio-diesel was not a major problem. First bio-diesel pump I saw on the way west was at a Love’s just west of Little Rock. I’d put a tad over a gallon in the tank before I noticed this little sticker…
…and quickly shut off the pump. That sticker, which I saw on every pump selling bio-diesel, is not helpful. But next to it (usually) is a bigger green sticker that does specify the grade you’re pumping. I never saw anything lower than B10 on the road, and nothing higher than B15. Mostly it was B10.
So there I was with a half tank of regular diesel left, plus I’d driven from Maryland with a full five gallon spare diesel can as insurance…that it eventually turned out I didn’t need. The Pilot truck stop across the highway had the same set of stickers on it. But across from the Pilot was a Petro and it had a Chevron station attached to it that had regular diesel pumps and I was able to fill up.
That was pretty much how it went all the way to California and back. Wherever I ran into bio-diesel I was always able to find a station nearby that had regular. But it was completely random as to which brand was a problem. Most often it was the Love’s. But I ran into it at all of the truck stop chains at least once. Usually it was the Shell or Chevron stations that had usable diesel, but I ran into it there too occasionally. But wherever I ran into it I nearly always found usable diesel right across the street. Just once in Arizona I had to drive to the next exit.
And there was no noticeable price break on the bio. If anything, the regular was usually cheaper, and sometimes by a lot. At one location in New Mexico there were two big truck stops, a Love’s and a Pilot, both selling bio at $3.95 a gallon. An independent travel center nearby was selling regular diesel at $3.73 a gallon.
My path this time took me well south of I-70. I have no idea how bad it is further north in corn state territory. But for now at any rate, I can drive my car from the East Coast to the West. How long that remains the case remains to be seen.
Truck Stops Are Now “Travel Plazas”. There are five big chains you see all the time on the road, Travel Centers of America, Love’s, Flying J, Pilot and Petro and while the truckers are their bread and butter business, they’re all vying for the long distance passenger car market and some like Flying J/Pilot are even offering us “loyalty cards” now. Flying J/Pilot is the chain that seems the most determined to remake itself as a general purpose highway “travel center” with a clean, uncluttered common floor plan and mini food/coffee court. I could walk into any Flying J or Pilot from Maryland to California and see pretty much the same layout and after a while you knew where everything was when you walked in the door. Their coffee bar was especially handy and the coffee was very good, with half to a dozen or so coffee dispensers all lined up with various blends in them. By the time I got to California I was making it a point to stop at one of these and I ended up getting a “Flying J/Pilot” loyalty card because I was stopping there so often for their coffee and breakfast muffins.
Rest rooms in the big chain truck stops are often Much cleaner than the state run highway rest stops. You need a high tolerance for country music though.
When stopping for the night, make sure your cell phone network isn’t crappy before checking in. Unless you really want to be disconnected from email and the web. I bought into the iPhone when the first one came out and that was an AT&T device only. Since then they’ve added other better carriers, but the one with the best network, Verizon, uses a digital signal that prevents their iPhone from doing both voice and data at the same time. So I stick with AT&T. But its network in the out of the way spots is crappy. The nice thing about cell phone technology is you aren’t dependent on your motel for internet service. But you need to remember to check your signal before you check in.
Almost any cheap motel room can be a good night’s sleep if you bring your own pillow and a sleeping bag that can double as a comforter. During winter travel you should always carry a good sleeping bag with you anyway, in case of breakdown. Also food and water. Take some good ear plugs (I use silicon ones) and I also bring along one of these white noise generators, because screaming dysfunctional family of five, or selfish TV volume up full jackass will probably be given the room next to yours. Note that these amenities can be found in expensive motels too, so if you aren’t as willing as I am to go with the cheap room you still need ear plugs at least and I strongly recommend the white noise generator too.With these four things, pillow, sleeping bag/comforter, ear plugs and white noise generator, all you really need to care about is is the room clean and the mattress reasonable.
Check the ersatz Continental Breakfast on your way out to see if there’s anything worth taking on the road with you. It’s included after all. Occasionally I am able to make a good breakfast muffin out of the sausage and egg servings. But it’s rare the cheap motels serve meat and eggs in the morning.
And…no matter how tired and irritable you are when you get off the road an into a room, smile and be nice to your desk clerk. I’ve worked late night and over night shifts a time or two in my life. They are not fun. And depending on how far into the sticks you are, that clerk checking you in may be desperately wanting to go with you when you leave the next morning. Once in a very small town in southern Utah, I was checked in by a young girl who chatted with me for a bit about her dream of getting onto American Idol. It was going to be her ticket out of there. I tried to suggest and tactfully as I could that her ticket out of there was to just get up and go. But the Unknown is a very frightening ball and chain on a person…I know this from personal experience, I suppose everyone does to some degree. Be nice to your desk clerk. Also everyone who serves you on the road. Especially in the sticks. Notice how they sometimes look at you like you are nuts when you tell them you’d love to move out of the city someday, into some nice quiet out of the way place in the country Just Like This One.
Don’t drive long into the night. Shift your schedule forward instead. Get off the highway early, early…like around six or seven. Then get back on the road next morning early. That way you have no trouble at the end of a long day on the road, getting a good room on the ground floor you can back your car up to. And early in the morning traffic will be very light to non-existent, which is a better way to start your day (obviously that does not apply in Washington D.C. or L.A.). And speaking of traffic…
Truck traffic was very heavy this trip actually. Which is good, because it means the economy is picking up. My own private economic indicator is train whistles. Here in Baltimore, when I hear them often I know heavy bulk goods are on the move, which is good. Whenever I am stopped for the night in Kingman Arizona (it usually works out that way somehow), I go watch the BNSF main line for a while. When times are good the trains are about fifteen minutes apart. When they’re not so good you maybe see or hear only one or two in a night. This trip the trains were running pretty constantly through Kingman, but not at fifteen minute intervals.
The new Mercedes loves the open road as much as its driver. 19 degree gale force winds in Virginia and crappy Arkansas highways barely rate its notice. And there is nothing more satisfying than hearing that muscular diesel engine sound in the morning as you repack the trunk, as though the next seven or eight hundred miles ahead of you that day are but a mere trifle on the way to its first hundred thousand miles. I chatted briefly at a diesel pump in Arroyo Grande with a couple young guys driving a very beat up old 240D. It had lost both its bumpers and its paint job was worn almost to the primer and its owner had bought it for $600 dollars and was absolutely in love with it. Tattered and worn as it looked he said it was the most solid and reliable car he’d ever owned. His friends he said, told him it was more like a piece of farm equipment than an automobile. But to a Mercedes aficionado, that is a complement. What most Americans don’t know unless they travel abroad, is Daimler is the world’s biggest maker of heavy trucks and buses, and the Mercedes diesel sedan is often seen doing taxi duty in other countries.
To make an automobile that is that heavy duty and substantial, yet also agile, comfortable and beautiful, is a serious work of engineering art. This is the car I’ve been dreaming of exploring the open road with all my life. I’ve owned it for just over a year now and put nearly 30k miles on it. But that was mostly on several drives down to Florida…three to Disney World and one to Key West…which were acceptable to it I suppose. Most days it’s just sitting in front of my little Baltimore rowhouse. I can walk to work, and to the grocery store and The Avenue and Cafe’ Hon in Hampden, and I absolutely hate city traffic. For a year now it may have been sitting there wondering if the slovenly pointless life of a computer geek’s status symbol was its fate after all.
I bought the ‘E’ class diesel, Traveler II, last December. It wasn’t exactly the kind of money I had in mind to spend…I would have been thrilled to own a ‘C’ class diesel…the smaller car seemed more reasonable for a single guy…but Daimler still won’t import those for some reason. As it turns out, I really Really like the ‘E’ class after all. It is a solid, beautiful car, very nice on my occasional passengers, has lots of extra trunk space (which is nice for people who take road trips with lots of camera equipment), and yet gets absolutely great fuel economy. It has been an absolutely solid and reliable ride all the way.
It’s already time for Traveler IIs 20,000 mile ‘B’ service. Since the plan is to eventually become one of those wirey old codgers with a Mercedes diesel that has half a million miles on it I feel off to a reasonably good start.
Thank You For Choosing A Mercedes-Benz…NOW TAKE CARE OF IT!
Just received in the mail today a nice letter from Mercedes-Benz USA, all done up on Very Nice stationary, thanking me for “choosing one of the most advanced diesel automobiles in the world…” and then just about screaming at me to stick to the factory maintenance schedule.
It is critical that you follow the service interval requirements of not more then 10,000 miles or one (1) year, whichever comes first. Permanent engine damage can occur if the interval is not closely followed.
(Emphasis theirs!) Followed by two more pages of Very Nice stationary detailing the maintenance schedule. As if I’d buy a car this expensive and not read the service book. You best believe I read the service book. Like a seminarian studying the holy writ I read the service book.
But I get their concern. I don’t think American drivers understand diesels. I wonder sometimes if one reason the Germans don’t import many of their diesel models into this country is because most American drivers just don’t know how to take care of one. The reputation of diesels, particularly Mercedes diesels, for über longevity probably doesn’t help any. People think hey…it’s a diesel…they’re tough. Well…yes. They’ll outlast a gasoline burner every time. But you have to do the maintenance. Oh…and don’t stomp on the accelerator in a futile attempt to get gasoline engine acceleration out of one because it isn’t in there.
The simplest routine thing you do for a car’s engine, the oil change, is absolutely vital for a diesel engine. That’s because the compression ratios on a diesel are greatly higher then even a high performance sports car’s is. Compression is how a diesel ignites its fuel. They work on the principle that compressing air heats it up. So at operating temperature a diesel gulps down a bunch of air, compresses it to temperature, and then at the right moment injectors squirt in the fuel and it ignites and you get your power stroke. For that to work compression has to be high enough to heat the air enough. (when starting cold, diesels use either glow plugs or pre-heat the fuel before it is injected.)
Compare: The Corvette LS9 6.2 liter V-8 with an Eaton four-lobe Roots type supercharger has a power output of 638 bhp at 6500 rpm and 604 lb ·ft at 3800 rpm and a compression ratio of 9.1:1. My 3 liter V-6 twin turbocharged Mercedes diesel on the other hand has a compression ratio of 17:1. In diesel fashion it only generates 240 bhp at a red line of 4500 rpm…about a third the Vette’s. However it generates 400 lb ·ft at 1800 rpm. So the Vette engine has it on torque and horsepower, but the diesel is less then half its displacement, still has 2/3rds its torque and look at where the torque Is.
These engines are not racehorses, they’re draft horses and they will go any distance and bear loads that would give a gasoline burner of equal size a heart attack. But you absolutely have to do the maintenance. You can slack on the oil changes in a gasoline burner or cheap out on the grade of oil used and still get good service out of one for quite a while before it catches up with you and gets expensive. A diesel can be completely destroyed in a very, Very short time if you do that. Like in under 30k. Try this wee experiment: look at the dipstick right after you’ve given a diesel engine an oil change. See how nice and golden the oil is? Look at it again at 100 miles. Looks dirty as hell doesn’t it? 17:1 and running on diesel oil not lightweight gasoline will do that.
This is the big reason why I never bought one second hand though I’ve wanted one since I was a teenager. By the time I was old enough and making enough to afford a second hand Mercedes diesel I’d seen tragically what your typical American driver does to a diesel engine. Yes, they’ll last practically forever. You can’t build 17:1 ignition-by-compression on the cheap and expect it to outlast the warranty. And the routine maintenance isn’t expensive. But you have to do it.
And I would recommend changing the oil twice as often as the factory recommends on any car. I’ve done that on every car I’ve ever owned and never had any engine problems. But it’s especially critical for a diesel. Daimler gives its engines very large oil reservoirs…something around nine quarts in the V-6s (compared to around 6 in an American V-8) and they say change every 10k. I change at five. The other service gets done on schedule.
So anyway…I’m looking at this very nice letter from Mercedes-Benz USA printed on Very Nice stationary and what I’m seeing is evidence that Americans just don’t know how to take care of a diesel. And these aren’t just any diesels. These are Mercedes-Benz. These are magnificent automobiles, they are expensive, they are exceptionally well made, and it is so embarrassing to see how MBUSA needs to gently remind its customers…it’s presumably well to do customers…on Very Nice stationary, to take fucking care of their cars.
I’ve been meaning to write this one for years actually. Ever since I bought my first Mercedes-Benz. And…trust me…just typing out that phrase “my first Mercedes-Benz” makes me want to do a double-take. Time was I lived in a friend’s basement and mowed lawns and did Manpower temp jobs to make ends meet, and I figured that was pretty much going to be my life. But even a low income kid can dream, and when mine turned to automobiles I always had pretty definite ideas about what a top rank, best of the best, car was.
I grew up in a household without a car. Mom divorced dad when I was 2 and we never had a lot of money. So for the first decade and a half of my life we were carless, and the edges of my childhood world were tied firmly to wherever public transportation and my own two feet could take me. Cars were fascinating, but distant things, like home ownership. I grew up in a series of garden apartments, always near some bus line that could take mom to work and near enough to walk to a small shopping center with a grocery store, a drugstore and a five and dime. It was still a time when most American households had only one car, if they had a car at all. So to be carless wasn’t necessarily considered a sign of poverty and we were not poor…I never went to bed hungry…just very low budget. We would get rides occasionally from neighbors and other church members when necessary, but mostly the weekly shopping trip involved a foldable two wheel grocery cart, something like this…
…which I would pilot, being the man and thereby the muscle in the household. Trips downtown, or to a deluxe shopping center some distance away (there were no malls back then), possibly involving a bus transfer ticket even, were very special occasions, and usually all day affairs the end of which left my little legs very tired. Vacations involved either Trailways, Greyhound or the train. I still vividly remember the magical two vacations we took to Lauderdale By The Sea, Florida, by way of the train. There was a dining car, and a car at the end of the train you could sit in and watch the landscape go by, and the lovely sound of the tracks clicking off the miles to sing me to sleep. It would never have occurred to me that a car was a necessity. A car was a luxury. We got by just fine without one. But oh…how nice to have one! Possibly even as nice as having a house of our very own.
I recall vividly the 1960 Ford Falcon one of the church lady’s had that took us back and forth to Sunday services…
…which would get so hot inside sitting in the sun during church services that even with the windows rolled all the way down by the time it got me back home I felt like a baked cookie. Or the 1959 Rambler Rebel owned by Mr. Rogers, one of the deacons…
…the car that taught me the value of seat belts well before they became mandatory equipment, when my little seven year old face got slammed into its all metal dashboard when Mr. Rogers had to stop suddenly to avoid a drunk driver. I never doubted after that that cars could be dangerous things. But they were magical things, whispering promises to little me of travel to distant places, in a time when my world pretty much ended at reach of mom’s voice.
I think my first glimpse of the 1958 Ford Thunderbird is what really ignited my love affair with the automobile.
I remember I was walking with mom to the local grocery store and one of those things went gliding by on the street and my little jaw dropped. From then on I was all about cars. I used to embarrass mom walking beside her as she shopped, pretending to be driving a car, holding my hands out on an imaginary steering wheel and making all the sound effects. But embarrassing mom is part of a small boy’s job description. Frightening to her, and in retrospect to me later in life, was my habit of peering into the windows of parked cars to admire the dashboards and steering wheels. This was a more Baroque age in American automobilia, and the dashboards and steering wheels of that time are amazing to me even today. They just don’t make them like this anymore…
I would get smacked every so often when mom caught me peering into a parked car, entranced by what I saw, and warned darkly that someday I’d find myself getting snatched away by a stranger. In retrospect it scares me now to think of too. Eventually one Christmas I got a toy that was probably intended to divert my attention away from parked cars…
When you turned the little pot metal ignition key it made a rumbling motor sound. There was a horn, wipers that flicked back and forth, turn signals that blinked, a light switch that illuminated the dials and gauges, and lots of finger candy just like the grownups had on their dashboards. It would be the only car I ever owned whose gas tank I could fill back up just by turning a knob.
I had an uncle who back in those days drove big Oldsmobiles. Probably more then anything else those cars set my childhood notions of what a luxury car was.
A luxury car was a car that was big and magnificent and had all the options, and even a few options you couldn’t get on the other models. Uncle Wayne’s Oldsmobile had Power Windows! No hand cranking in a luxury car…you just pressed a button one way and the window went up…pressed it the opposite way and it went down. What won’t they think of next? It had Power Seats! Oooooh!!! You just pressed a button and the seats moved forward or backward. It was a push button future all right. It had an antenna that automagically extended when you turned on the AM/FM Radio!!! It had two-tone bench seats. It had a light in the glove compartment. It had Air Conditioning!!!! Cool air, really cool air, flowed out of these chrome plated vent balls at either end of the dashboard, and from some chrome plated vents in the middle…
Oh. My. God!!! Our apartment didn’t have Air Conditioning, and here it was in a car no less! No more rolling down the windows in the summertime and waiting outside the car before getting in, until the seats were something less then frying temperature.
Its speedometer had the first progress bar I ever laid eyes on. Instead of a needle that swept across the numbers, it had a green bar that extended from left to right in a horizontal box…
When it got up to highway speeds…40 and over…the green bar was replaced by an orange one. Above 60 it became red.
But the thing that just floored me was the magic button in the middle of the windshield wiper knob. Uncle Wayne showed me one day what it did. He pulled the knob and the wipers started wiping…so much so obvious. Then he pressed the magic button and two little jets of soapy water squirted out onto the window!!!
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
It was perfectly clear to me what a luxury car was. A luxury car was a car that had all the options, and maybe even a few options you couldn’t get on the other cars. You certainly weren’t going to get power windows, let alone power seats, on a plain old ordinary everyday Chevy. No. It had to be an Oldsmobile. And if you wanted leather instead of cloth seats, then obviously you would have to step up to a Cadillac.
One day, when I was 16, he came for a visit driving his brand new Mercedes-Benz 220D…
I was…nonplussed. I knew by then that Mercedes-Benz was a German luxury car of some sort, but I had a general disdain for European cars. They were expensive compared to U.S. cars, plain and generally unexciting. And here before my very eyes, was the proof. And…it was a diesel! You didn’t have to know the ‘D’ meant diesel, you knew it the moment he started it up. They’d put a truck engine in a luxury car.
Mind you, by this stage of my life I’d already decided I was a four-door sedan kinda guy. Sports cars didn’t really do much for me, though I admired the engineering that went into them and loved to watch them race. But they weren’t practical for what I wanted to do with a car by that age, which was see the country…just take my maps and my luggage, find some roads I’d never been down before and go. I wanted a car I could drive comfortably in for hours at a time, which you really couldn’t in a low slung, stiff suspensioned sports car, could carry lots of luggage and cargo here and there, could drive my friends anywhere we wanted to go. It had to be a sedan…preferably one with four doors because two doors meant folding down the front seat and squirming your way into the back. I had no money for a car of my own, and not much hope I’d ever have one either. But I had specifications.
This is a luxury car??? I wandered around the Mercedes while my aunt and uncle took their luggage in and chatted with mom. It was small compared to the last Oldsmobile he’d had, and boxy. There wasn’t nearly as much chrome. It had no fins. The front row were two unappealing looking bucket seats. From outside the dashboard looked a bit sparse, the steering wheel somewhat old fashioned. Then my uncle invited me to sit down in it. I opened the passenger side front door and noted the locking mechanism looked very simplistic and odd. I sat down in the bucket seat, closed the door…
…and that was when I realized I was in a whole different world.
This thing is built like a bank vault… I’d never experienced the like of it. Just sitting there I could feel the solidness of it. The seats, made I later learned of the legendary MB-Tex, weren’t soft and cushy like the Olds, but very firm and somehow lots more comfortable in spite of that. And there was absolutely no wiggle in them. They weren’t power seats like the Olds. There was a lever directly in the front and bottom of the seat that you lifted up and then you could move the seat backward or forward. It slide smoothly, and when you snapped it into place the seat locked firmly and would not budge, even a little.
You got used to a slight degree of slop in a car back then. It was normal. A little give, a little wiggle here and there wasn’t a big deal unless it got excessive. A little play in the steering wheel, a little give in the shift lever and turn signals. You knew a car was a mass produced thing and you didn’t expect anything mass produced in those days to be as tight as a watch. Just so it wasn’t so loose it felt like it was about to come apart. Thing was, a little initial looseness usually ended up being a lot of looseness. Things broke down. Lots. And so you took them in for repair. Cars especially in those days, needed lots of repair. But you expected that, just as you expected that a car would not last much further then 50k miles. Odometers back then only had five digits on them. You pushed a car all the way back to the point all the zeros rolled back over…100k…only if you didn’t have the money for a new one, or you were stubborn.
A good car was one that didn’t break down in the first few months of ownership. A great car got you maybe all the way to 50k on just the routine maintenance, and maybe a few minor repairs for things like a knob that fell off or got stuck. By 50k you’d have replaced the brakes several times, and the exhaust pipes and muffler, and the shocks maybe half that. You’d have gone through several sets of tires and multiple tune-ups. That was routine and you bought a car knowing all that was coming. But you also expected at least one or two break downs somewhere along the way. Cars just did that. A lemon was a car that did it every week. A good car maybe only once or twice in 50k miles. Beyond 50k you knew it would give you more trouble then it was worth. So most people traded in at that point for a new one. And so it went. By the time he’d bought that 220D, my uncle had gone through several Oldsmobiles.
And there I was, sitting in a car that Just Felt like uncle Wayne could have driven it clean around the world and it would only just be broken in. I looked over the dashboard, every instrument and knob exactly centered in it’s holder, noticed the odometer had Six Digits on it…and I think I sat there for a few moments with my jaw hanging open nearly catatonic…like Bowman in 2001 sitting in his space pod at the end of his trip down the stargate. Then I was a barrage of questions. How much did it cost? Why a diesel? Is it hard to find diesel fuel? How do you start a diesel? What kind of mileage do you get on Diesel? What’s the maintenance like? Do you need metric tools to work on it?
He explained to me how Mercedes didn’t come out with a new model every year, but instead made little incremental improvements over maybe an eight or ten year run. He told me how if a part showed more wear or breakage then expected it would be redesigned and improved and once the improvement was approved it went right into the production line and no waiting for the next model year. And when you needed a new part you always got the latest most improved one, not an identical to the one that just broke on you part. That was the Mercedes way. He told me that the diesels got way better mileage because diesel fuel had more energy in it by volume, and since a diesel had to be built strong if you took care of one it would last not just 50k but easily hundreds of thousands of miles. He told me about its safety features and how they were building Mercedes-Benz cars with crumple zones back when Detroit was fighting Washington over seat belts. He told me about the cornering and handling capabilities of the car and that they were engineered primarily as safety measures: the best way to handle an accident is to prevent one from happening in the first place. A car that can get its driver out of danger is a safer car. He told me that all the engineering in a Mercedes-Benz was judged against that purpose. Speed and handling weren’t just about speed and handling…they were about safety. German practicality. I felt myself falling in love.
We went for a short ride in the country. I thought I knew how good a sports car was in the curves. I was naive. American sports cars were no damn good in the curve back then. They were big muscle bound V-8 things that would blast you off the road in the straight and get lost in the curve. For an afternoon I sat in a little boxy four door sedan that didn’t accelerate very fast at all, the Oldsmobiles would have laughed at it on the on ramp, but it took the twisty little country back roads we traveled down like it was foreign to no road on earth and just hunkered down and glued itself to the asphalt. It felt like it could have taken the corners at twice the speed my uncle took them. You felt the road under the tires, and the car’s response to it, but not in a scary or discomfortable way. The ride was smooth and serene but not to the point you lost your feel for the road…and that was the thing that stunned me most. I’d never really known before what it was to experience a car that gave you such absolute control before then. A luxury car was supposed to insulate you from the road…make you feel like you were gliding along on a cushion of air! No. I saw it then. A car that takes the feel of the road away from its driver takes their control away too. A great car gives its driver absolute control, moment by moment and that means you have to be able to feel the road under you, and the response of the car to it. The car I was riding in did that…I could feel it even though I was in the passenger seat. It was the first time in my life I’d really experienced that…and it was no sports car. It was a boxy little four door sedan.
Yes, yes…most American luxury car models can take a curve at high speed now and keep you in control. But try to imagine going down a twisty country road in a 1971 Cadillac DeVille and trying to make it take the curves like it was a sports car. No. More like a whale.
That whole day I never once asked my uncle why he bought that boxy little four door sedan. The moment I sat down in it I knew damn well why he bought it. For the next several decades of my life I wanted one too. Some decades later, to my amazement still, I was able to afford one…
…and then…a few years after that…finally…a diesel….
…like the one my uncle drove to visit in, but with forty years of incremental improvements.
In my thirties, broke, doing Manpower temp jobs and mowing lawns to make ends meet, living in a friend’s basement, I never thought I’d own another car again, let alone a new one, let alone a Mercedes-Benz. Luxury. It is not about money. Luxury is better then good enough. At one time in my life a car was something our family considered a luxury. We got by without. And though that was a long time ago, practically in a different America, some folks even now consider cars a luxury item. If you live in the urban zones you can probably get by without one most of the time. But even the new carless urbanites still make use of new ways to rent when they need a car. ZipCar and Car2Go being examples. Owning a car in today’s America might still be considered a luxury in some places. But a car is still more necessity now then it was back when I was a toddler and Washington D.C. still had trolly lines and transcontinental train lines still boasted of their speed and comfort.
Gottlieb Daimler’s motto was “Das Beste oder nichts”, The best or nothing. But what is “best”? If basic transportation will do there is much you can buy nowadays, thanks to the ass kicking Japan gave the rest of the auto making world, that will get you from point A to point B and give you your money’s worth for years and years and then some. My first new car after decades of bare bones living and no prospects was a little Geo Prism and that car was a champion. Under the skin it was a Toyota Corolla and I’d own one again in a heartbeat if I didn’t have the money for the car I do now and I’d be proud of it. It was well made and if you took care of it it would outlast a lot of other makes. I got just over 200k miles out of mine. But if you are lucky and you have it to spend you can reach for something better then basic transportation. That’s luxury. But what is better? What is best?
There’s a scene in Mary Renault’s novel, The Last of the Wine, where the philosopher and teacher Socrates and Alexis, one of his young followers, are walking down a street where the armorers are busy working. They’d been discussing Alexis’ troubles in love and hearing the sound of the armorer’s hammers, Socrates, slyly testing the boy, supposes aloud that now that he is of age he will soon be wanting to buy his first set of armor. Where will you go, he asks. To Pistias, if I can afford his price, says Alexis. “He’s very dear; nine or ten minas for a horseman’s suit.” “So much?”, wonders Socrates aloud. Well surely you’ll get a nice gold device on the breastplate for that kind of money. Not from Pistias, says Alexis, he wouldn’t touch that if you gave him twelve. Kephalos, says Socrates, will give you something to catch the eye. Well but Socrates, says Alexis, I might need to fight in it.
That. A Cadillac or a Lincoln is expensive because it has all the options…all the nice gold devices you can’t get on a Chevy or a Ford…and because the job of a Cadillac or a Lincoln is to tell the world you have a lot of money to spend. Under the skin, a Cadillac is a Chevy and there is no reason other then the marque to not give a Chevy all the options a Cadillac has. That’s how they do it in Japan, where what we call a Lexus here in the U.S. is still a Toyota over there. But here in the U.S., driving a high end Toyota does not say “money”. A Cadillac is expensive, because it is a Cadillac and not a Chevy. A Rolls Royce is expensive because it is practically hand made, by the best artisans working in the finest rarest woods, the finest rarest leathers, the finest wool carpeting, meticulously hand producing only a few cars every year. Ostentatious spending, yes, but at least its ostentatious spending in the service of excellence in craftsmanship. But the engineering and the technology in a Rolls or a Bentley is subordinate to the purpose of luxury for its own sake…everything about the car is about pampering and calling attention to its owner, it’s all about the nice gold device and something to catch the eye. But I might need to drive in it. All day and through the night, down uncertain roads, through whatever weather, in whatever conditions the journey throws at me.
And I have driven my Mercedes-Benz cars, mostly the little ‘C’ class because I’d owned it several years, but now also my ‘E’ class diesel, through some pretty hazardous weather, and down long twisty gravelly roads, winding up and down hazardous no guardrails here sorry you’re on your own terrain, and over scorching desert landscapes and I have never felt safer inside an automobile, or more in control when the going got seriously ugly. Luxury. I could always walk to the grocery store and take the bus or the train come vacation time. But I love cars and I love to drive and I want to see whatever there is down all the roads I’ve never been down. I want a car that will take me to all those places. Not an SUV because I drive long distances and also short ones over many kinds of roads and my car needs to be agile and fuel efficient not large, clunky and hungry all the time. But not a sports car either because I need to carry cargo and passengers. Comfortable on the inside, because I will be driving long hours. And built to keep its passengers safe, because you never know. And yes, beautiful too, because I love the automobile. But not empty beauty. Beauty that comes from within. I have specifications.
These days I admire car interiors from a safe distance via Google Images, and at the dealer’s whenever I take a car in for routine servicing and I can sit down inside one in the showroom and wonder. When I first laid eyes on the new ‘E’ class it took my breath away so beautiful did I find them to be inside and outside. Thank you Dr. Z for making them solid again, like they used to be. When I sat down in my very own new ‘E’ class diesel last December, and started its engine for the first time, it made a sound like I could have driven it clean around the world and it would only just be broken in. Das Beste oder nichts!
[Edited and edited again…and again…and again…sorry…]
Daimler AG purchased the Maybach luxury car brand in 1960 and eventually groomed it to become a rival to ultra-luxury vehicle manufacturers Bentley and Rolls-Royce. Now, Daimler has quietly ended the Maybach saga.
Everybody knew the fate of the brand after Dr. Dieter Zetche in November last year confirmed its discontinuation. The final nail on the coffin was the new pricelist released by Mercedes-Benz USA featuring its 2013 model range. All the five Maybach models offered in the US—the 57, 57 S, 62, 62 S, and Landaulet—were listed as “Discontinued.”
In the end its major claim to fame was its price…high even by Rolls Royce and Bentley standards. You have to figure they thought that alone would attract the Rolls Royce customer. Which means they didn’t really understand that customer. But even worse, Daimler forgot who they are.
I think I understand a little better why they did it now. Daimler produced a Maybach concept car in the late 90s while it looked like troubled Rolls Royce Motors would be sold off and Audi and BMW were looking on hungrily (the name Maybach comes from Wilhelm Maybach, the engineering and design genius who worked with Gottlieb Daimler back in the early days, and who designed the first the Mercedes model, built to the specifications of auto enthusiast and racer Emil Jellinek (whose daughter was named Mercedes…Jellinek named that first Maybach designed race car after his daughter.)). Eventually Audi was successful in getting the Rolls Royce car and its factories, but BMW got the rights to the Rolls Royce name, the distinctive grille, and the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament, and in the early 2000s started a new Rolls Royce bloodline literally from scratch. Which by the way also explains why the new Rolls is so damn ugly. You can say a lot of good things about BMWs from an engineering standpoint I suppose, but beautiful cars they really just aren’t (except for the two seater).
I guess Daimler felt under the circumstances they had to compete with BMW, their arch rival, for the Rolls Royce customer. So out came the Maybach around the same time as BMW started making its BMW Rolls and Audi was producing what were Rolls Royces but now under the Bentley marque. But the Mercedes marque was never about luxury merely for its own sake and ironically by trying to out Rolls BMW they weren’t rising their sights but lowering them.
That is why they failed. The Maybach was built on a prior ‘S’ class frame and had none of the cutting edge engineering and technology the current model ‘S’ class had. It was merely an older ‘S’ with lots of ostentatious luxury touches…rare leathers, woods, a champagne cooler in the armrest, and so on. By dropping the Maybach and instead producing an “ultimate” ‘S’ class variant they’re back to their place of artistry and strength and where their traditional customers, who are not about luxury for its own sake, are.
When Gottlieb Daimler said “The best or nothing” he wasn’t talking about the rarest and most expensive leather for the upholstery.
I’ve been posting about this on my Facebook page but not so much here. Last December I traded the C class (Traveler, henceforth known as Traveler I) for a new E class diesel, which I’ve named Traveler II (or simply Traveler. The Garrett side of my family tree has a habit of simply passing down names and since this is another Mercedes sedan I’m just continuing a tradition.) The trading in of cars before they’re completely unusable with age is not typical of me, but I’d wanted to own a Mercedes diesel since I was a teenage boy and an uncle came for a visit in his brand new 220D. The lady who sold me Traveler I called, left voice mail because I didn’t pick up, and said she could put me into a new C class for less then I’d paid for the first one. I called her back, left voice mail because she didn’t pick up, and said I was very disappointed Daimler still wasn’t importing the C class diesels (they sell one in Europe that gets an honest 40mpg around town so they say), but if she could put me into a new E class diesel for not too much more I might be interested. Well of course I got an immediate call back: Oh there’s one on the dock that’s just for you!
A diesel suits me better then any other sort of car for the long distance road trips I like to take, and because I like having solid things in my life and a diesel is solidness and robustness embodied. When I started this car up for the first time on the dealer’s lot the engine made a sound like I could have driven it clean around the world and it would have only just been broken in. It was love at first revs.
The Mercedes-Benz diesel-powered mid-size sedan is as durable a notion as you’ll find in autodom. Mercedes created the world’s first production diesel-powered passenger car in 1935 and began putting oil burners in its mid-sizers (a.k.a. Pontons) in 1955. The very words “Mercedes diesel” conjure all kinds of associations, from college professors who have forsaken their Peugeots, to wiry German mechanics, to cab drivers in Kabul. It’s an archetype; a 911 Turbo for meerschaum-smoking squares, a Shelby Mustang for people who got beat up in high school. -Car and Driver, “2011 Mercedes-Benz E350 BlueTec Diesel – The evolution of der classic”
I’m 58 years old, and if this car lives up to its heritage it will be the last car I ever own. Every now and then since driving it home I’ve pulled up to the diesel pump and someone in a Mercedes has pulled up to the other side of the pump and we chat. Often they’re cars that are 10, 20 even 30+ years old and their owners are still in love. These are expensive cars but my sense from talking to other owners is most Mercedes owners, at least the diesel owners, are enthusiasts who weren’t interested in owning an empty status symbol. I took the car to Key West a couple weeks ago and on the way back talked to a man who pulled up to the pump in a 1979 300D. The car looked nearly new, except for wear on the seats, so he’d been taking very good care of it. It had just over 400k miles on it and its owner was still delighted with it.
My new Mercedes diesel is in a metallic color called “Lunar Blue”, which looks almost black in the shadows and a nice deep sky blue in the bright sunlight. I couldn’t get every option and still be able to afford an E class…unlike the ‘C’ I had to settle for less then I wanted…but I got a couple good safety options, including the lane keeping option which uses a camera to detect the lane markings and if you start drifting out of your lane it bumps the steering wheel to get your attention. The best part is it has more passenger and trunk space, feels lots more comfortable then the C (which was itself amazingly comfortable on long distance trips), is solider, quieter, more sumptuous (in the no bullshit understated Mercedes way) then the C and yet it gets way better fuel mileage then the C did and is cleaner emissions wise due to its high tech urea emissions control system. The urea tank occupies the space the spare tire would have, so I have run flats instead.
When I first brought the C class home several years ago it raised some eyebrows in the neighborhood. When I brought this E class home I think some of my neighbors thought I’d gone overboard in the self gratification department. Well…yes and no. The self gratification element is I bought my Mercedes because ever since I was a teenage boy I’ve been simply awed by the quality of their engineering and build. Well…except for that little stretch between 1998 and 2006. But they’re building them again now like they used to and after driving this one for six months now and driving it to Florida twice I am convinced that this model E will take its place with some of the other legendary sedans like the W123. As I said, I like solid things in my life and these cars are magnificently engineered and built. I wish I could shake the hand and thank personally everyone on the assembly line in Sindelfingen who built mine. It isn’t a status symbol, and not even really a statement although you can read it as being one. I simply like over engineered solidly made things that are built to last. It’s the waste-not, want-not plus do the job right or don’t do it at all mindset I grew up on. It’s served me well throughout my life and the older I get, the more I believe in it.
Which also means you don’t buy something like this and run it into the ground. Traveler has had its first 10k service ‘A’ and two oil changes already. I change the oil in my cars at least twice as often as the factory recommends. I changed the oil every two-thousand miles in my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto, and got almost 136k out of it and even then the engine was in near new condition. I only had to get rid of the car because everything around the engine was falling apart. American cars in those days, an especially small American economy cars, were simply not built to last; consider they only had five digits on the odometer back then. Now I own a car with a heritage of extreme longevity. You take care of a car built like that and you don’t feel like you’re fighting a loosing battle. Every month I get my cleaning tools, shop vac and buckets out and spend several hours giving the Mercedes a good going over inside and out. I had about a half dozen bottles of various car care lotions arrayed around the car last Sunday…something for the vinyl seats, something for the dashboard, something for the wood trim, something for the leather wrap around the steering wheel, tar remover, carpet cleaner…and so on…(I’m a geek…I researched all of this stuff to get exactly what was right for the car) and I have all these different kinds of towels and cleaning tools and brushes and the shop vac’s attachments for various tasks and I’m a busy little bee going here and there around the car. They built me a good car, and now I’m going to take care of it. But it’s a labor of love too.
And something I’ve noticed is people see me doing that and the attitude changes. You can park an expensive German luxury car in a working class neighborhood and if your neighbors see you sweating over it, fussing over it, taking care of it, then its just your own personal eccentricity rather then an empty ostentatious display of money. People don’t mind you spend that much as long as they see some respect for the value of money on your part.
Now the car and I get smiles from the neighbors we didn’t at first. Now it’s I’m just another American male in love with his car. They know better then to start a conversation with me about Mercedes-Benz automobiles though because I’ll talk their ears off about it.
Happy new E Class diesel owner aging longhair hippy nerd on day of delivery,
complete with psychedelic license plates…
As with the SLK online owner’s manual we’ve shown you before, Mercedes-Benz has now launched the interactive manuals for the Mercedes-Benz C-Class (w204) compact executive car and the C-Class Estate station wagon (s204). -BenzInsider.com
Mercedes Benzwill equip their executive compact sedan, the Mercedes Benz C-Class 2012, with Nokia Terminal Mode technology. -Ninga Media
The ‘C’ comes in three flavors, only two of which are imported here to the States: the Sport and Luxury versions. So I note that Daimler is pushing the ‘C’ class Luxury now as its “Executive Compact Sedan”, and the first thought that crosses my mind is that little word “Executive” is good for an additional five or six grand on the sticker price.
But this is good. When the W204 first came out people were displeased at the reduced level of wood trim and other small refinements compared to the ‘E’. Initially there were no memory seats and other little things that raise the level of elegance and in their defense people said that the ‘C’ was never meant to be that anyway. But others like myself were thinking Daimler also didn’t want to take customers away from the ‘E’ which is their bread and butter “Executive” sedan. The smaller ‘C’ sold for less and if people could get ‘E’ class elegance in a less expensive car (and…seriously… we’re talking a Mercedes-Benz here…none of them are cheap!) they’d go get a ‘C’ instead.
But you would also want a ‘C’ if you’re like me, single, childless, and not needing a larger car. I’ve looked at the new ‘E’…it is just magnificent. I could afford one (barely). But it’s too much car for me. I just don’t need something that big. And the fuel economy hit is more then I can morally justify in a car that is 99 percent rolling down the road with just me in it. That gasoline is just being wasted and I am still, deep down inside, a waste not want not little Baptist boy. Okay…who drives a Mercedes-Benz. But still.
Small car = cheap basic transportation car is not such a simple calculation anymore. Rising gasoline costs and fleet fuel efficiency mandates require that car companies sell smaller, more fuel efficient cars. And German companies to their credit, are way more interested in being “green” then either American or Japanese car companies. So Daimler needs to aim for at least ‘E’ class elegance in the Mercedes ‘C’. There is no reason why a compact sedan cannot also be a sumptuous one, other then the stereotype of the compact car as inevitably being the basic transportation bare bones economy model. In an age of rising fuel costs, that has to change. The small car can be sumptuous too.
Now then…er…about that “Executive” thing…
Eddie Izzard…darn him. I watched Dressed To Kill and now I just can’t read anything with the word “Executive” in it nowadays without thinking of this bit…
“I’m much more in the executive transvestite area.”
Fucking weirdo transvestite…Executive transvestite. Fucking weirdo transvestite…Executive transvestite. Economy compact sedan…Executive compact sedan. Fucking weirdo transvestite…Executive transvestite… I am really not in the market for trading in the car I have now…I am still thoroughly happy with Traveler…I think it will eventually become one of those quarter to half million mile Mercedes you see every now and then in the pages of enthusiast magazines. Really, that’s how I feel about it. My instinct is to hold on to a car until it simply can’t be driven anymore and that’s one reason why I was attracted to the Mercedes brand back when I was a little teenage geek. Right now I feel like I can just spend the money on servicing and pampering my car and it will last forever. And Daimler will give you a special over quarter million kilometer grill badge when your Mercedes odometer clicks over that much. How many other car companies Want you to be proud you held on to the car that long? But I go to my dealer for routine service and I still wander around the showroom floor while Traveler is back in the shop…and I just know I will have to work at keeping a straight face when the sales agents pitch this executive compact sedan stuff at me. Yes yes, I’m much more in the executive compact sedan area…
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…
Two options I made sure to get when I bought Traveler were the fold down rear seats and the trunk liner. I did this because the car, lovely though it is, needed to be a working member of the family too. It’s been a welcome feature this past couple weeks as I’ve been trying hard to rid Casa del Garrett of all the excess…stuff.
I took a load to the city recycling drop-off yesterday. It’s an uneasy feeling driving a Mercedes-Benz carefully among the dumpster rows. You just get the feeling the car doesn’t belong here, even though you’re just taking care of the same everyday household business your neighbors are. But among the banged up pickup trucks loaded down with junk, the car sticks out. What yuppy scum is this bringing his luxury car here? What’s he throwing out…his old expresso machine?
One of the trash guys started backing up a drumpster next to where I was busy unloading Traveler. He gets out of his truck and walks over to my car and looks carefully at the tires. Then he asks me if they’re 19" or 17". I’m embarrassed to admit I hadn’t a clue, but he looks more carefully at them, declares them to be 19" and says his own Mercedes has 19s too but he wasn’t sure they were right for that car. Turned out he had a CLK he’d bought second-hand from Carmax. If I’d had half a brain I’d have bought a used Mercedes ages ago and I’d have had one to drive then for more of my life. The two of us chatted easily for a while about our favorite car maker before getting back to work. We were both fans.
Well. If the trashman owns a Mercedes, I don’t have to feel so self conscious about driving mine with a load to the dump from time to time. That’s the thing about these cars…they’re not just empty status symbols. People in all walks of life appreciate them for their engineering. The car gave me a reminder of that as I pulled away from the dumpster.
I’d emptied the trunk and the back seat, and flipped back up the rear seatbacks. Then I got behind the wheel and started the engine and immediately got an alert in the speedometer display that the right rear seatback wasn’t fully latched. So I got back out and checked it and sure enough. Just a little nudge and it locked into place. I’d been too offhanded about flipping the seats back up. But it was another discovery about my car. I’ve had it for three months shy of two years and I’m still discovering things about it. Whatever senses the seatbacks aren’t latched has to know, somehow, the difference between all the way down and not fully up. It isn’t like the doors where you can just throw an alert if they’re ajar when the driver starts down the road. Sometimes the driver will drive off with the rear seat backs down because they’re taking a load somewhere. So the car had to know I meant to latch them back up again, and hadn’t.
And I’m sure the Daimler engineers considered it a safety issue. Logically it isn’t a hard issue: you just test for the seat being in the upright position but not latched. But that’s more complex then simply testing for not latched, which is all you need to do for the doors. And I didn’t just get a generic One Of The Seatbacks isn’t latched messages, it told me which one it was. Just like it has whenever I’ve tried to drive off with a door ajar. I love this car. Geeze…why haven’t I owned one of these before now…?
I mentioned in This Post some time ago, about how expensive wiper blades were for my Mercedes. A little update: It turned out I didn’t need to replace the blades I had on there just then after all. The streaking I saw was due to some dirt and once I cleaned it off the blades resumed their excellent job. So I saved the spare blades I’d just bought, keeping them in the trunk as backups. I only just now had to, finally, replace the factory blades. This is almost a year and a half after I took delivery on the car. I’m very impressed. Those factory blades got a lot of use.
If it seems like I’m completely geeking out here I beg to differ. Wiper blades are one of those little items nobody really thinks about that actually play a critical safety role. Most of the time these little plastic and rubber items sit tucked away behind the hood and you forget they’re there until it starts raining or some car in front of you kicks some water mixed with dirt or road salt onto your windshield. When you need them they’d better work.
One of my pet peeves ever since I got my first car is how little thought the car makers, until very recently it seems, were putting into something as critical as keeping the damn windshield clean while you’re driving. Wiper arms and blades back when I was a teenager in the 70s, and for most of the 80s and 90s too, were just these crappy little afterthoughts that did the job just well enough but never really all that good. And you were lucky if you got more then a few months out of a set of blades before they started streaking on you. Usually right at eye level.
When I bought my Mercedes I thought a couple odd little blade-like items that had been stuffed in the back pocket of the front passenger seat were a set of spare wiper blades, and I was impressed by the thoughtfulness. But it turns out, at least for ‘C’ class customers, Mercedes isn’t that generous. Those little things weren’t spare blades after all. I still have no idea what they are…I keep forgetting to ask the parts guys at my dealer about them. But when I found I didn’t need to replace the factory blades last March as I’d thought, I kept the pair I’d just bought in the trunk as backups. It’s a good idea to keep a spare set handy.
I only now had to, finally, replace the factory installed blades. The Mercedes blades come out of the box bent like a bow, and their tops are shaped like an airfoil to hold the blades firmly against the glass at highway speeds. Replacing the old ones is a snap. You just tilt up the arms and then tilt the blades 90 degrees from the shaft and they just slide right off. Slide the new ones on, tilt forward, place the arms back down…done. Less then three minutes and part of that was double-checking the instruction manual while I did it. As is typical on this car, everything fits together right. There is no fussing with any of it. The parts fit together like they’re supposed to.
I tried the new blades out with a few washer squirts. The sound these things make is like a whisper gliding over glass. I have never seen wipers work as smoothly or as thoroughly as these. It may seem like a small thing but all winter long last year and this traffic in front of me has kicked water and road salt onto my car and all I notice now is that my hood gets dirty and the car needs a wash. The blades are long and one arm is articulated and between them nearly all the windshield is kept perfectly clean. I’ve almost forgotten what it was like to have to squint through my windshield all winter long.
God forbid the economy ever gets so bad and I loose my job and I have to sell everything, including the car. But if that day ever comes, swear to god I’ll go buy a used Mercedes with whatever I can cobble together, no matter how many miles it has on it, and drive that. Probably not anything made when they were having quality control problems, say between the late 90s and early 2000s. But I am not driving anything that doesn’t have that three pointed star on it anymore. I’m just not. I sincerely regret now, not buying a used one back when I could afford a car again. I’d have had one to enjoy for so much more of my life then I did, because I stubbornly held out for new. It’s not the status value. It’s the engineering. It’s the satisfaction of driving something made by people who put some real thought into how a car should work and made it as well as they could. A friend said this car would change my idea of what normal is. Yes it has. Oh yes.
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