Mercedes Benz is a car company that makes cars that a perceived by the public to be exquisite and yes there is some truth to this perception depending on your view of what being exquisite means when in the driver’s seat of a car. I recently got to take the Mercedes Benz’s latest A200 on to the street to find out what it was like.
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Mercedes Benz has created for itself the image coolness. The Mercedes badge is widely understood to be a marque one would work towards having on their car and on their driveway. The company reminds me of Apple, creators of the iPhone, iPad and iPod, in that the brand is perceived to be luxurious and exclusive and serves as a status symbol and is therefore assumed by many to be the best in its business when in actual fact this isn’t always necessarily the case. This is caused by how the company is marketed to the public and that leads to people being oblivious to the fact that some of the brand’s rivals may have better offerings in different segments. To illustrate my point, take the Mercedes Benz G63 for example; many people think the car is cool and fast and many dream of owning one and this is all well and good except for the fact that the car is complete and utter crap. The interior reminds me of a Mahindra Scorpio and the ride quality does as well but because of the fact that it is marketed well by being driven by celebrities and popular social media people, many think it is a car worth working towards having. I have also noticed that when I ask people who like Mercedes Benz AMG models in particular why they like them over cars from their rivals, I often get answers like “I just think they’re cool” or “I can’t put it into words”.
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The above analysis does apply to some models within the Mercedes Benz range like some C-Class derivatives but, happily, not to the A-Class. The latest A-Class is a genuinely good hatchback and this is true partly because it is such an improvement over the older, much uglier, crap boxes that once bore the A-Class name. The current A-Class is genuinely a car anyone would be more than happy to own. It’s a beautiful hatchback and it is quite rapid and apparently it gets you laid, why wouldn’t you want to own one?
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The one I recently got to drive was an A200 and that means it has a 2 litre engine. No it doesn’t, I’m lying. It has a 1.3 litre turbocharged engine good for 125 kilowatts of power and the engine delivers the power surprisingly excitingly. I’m not saying that the car is mahoosively fast but it does pack a punch of sorts when it gets the opportunity to stretch its legs on the open road. It gives me more than enough confidence to attempt some ballsy overtakes. I just have one criticism of the car’s engine note however, that criticism is that I can hear it in the cabin. I’m sorry but if you want to hear the engine from within the cabin it has to be a sexy one like the ferocious raw of the previous C63 AMG or the sporty crackles of a Golf GTI, what you don’t want to hear is the dreary whine that comes from the A200’s turbocharged puny 1.3 litre engine. That gets old real quick.
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Now on to the business of the interior. It’s good. That’s it. It’s sort of what you would expect from this segment, buttons everywhere that do various things but I have to complain about the sheer number of buttons on the steering wheel. There are just too many of the damn things and they all do various things but many of them do things that I’m not even the least bit interested in. The driver display instrument cluster also gives you a bunch of information that I really couldn’t be arsed about. All I need to know is how fast I’m going and when to change gear when using the flappy paddles, I find the rest of it ostentatious and, quite frankly, useless. The all new all-digital dash is quite striking and it adds a bit of modernity to the cabin but I’m old fashioned, so whatever.
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The car is surprisingly spacious at the back as well, which is a good thing when you’re travelling with the family and I suspect many of the car’s buyers will because the car reaches out to so many different demographics and types of people, some of them with families with members of ‘normal’ proportions. Then there is the issue of ride comfort. For me it was quite jiggly even in the car’s most comfortable setting. I felt all the bumps on the road and that also gets very old very quickly. You do get a Mercedes badge though and that is all that matters (read sarcastically).
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The star of the show, for me though, has to be the car’s automated intelligence system (AI). It’s not as quirky nor as spunky when it comes to personality as the one you’d find in the current line-up of BMWs but thankfully it isn’t as slow either and the best part of all is that it is much more comprehensive because as a man who really doesn’t want to have to fiddle with buttons while I’m driving, I can access all of the car’s settings with just my voice and unlike the voice command systems of other cars, this one actually does what you want it to and that for me sort-of wins me over.
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All in all the latest A200 is a good car and I can think of some reasons why you wouldn’t want to buy one with your own money but on the same token there are many reasons why you would and the badge is definitely one of them.
