BMW M3:- Still doing it right after all these years.

Some cars are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. The BMW M3, it could be argued, falls into every one of those categories.  It's been around for a quarter of a century in one iteration or another, but while so many other cars run out of ideas like recent episodes of the Simpsons, the M3 always has something new to offer.

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The Bewitching Hour:- An AMG Evening.

There's a homeless man sitting on the bench the on other side of the road. I'm sitting here, in a frightfully well-to-do part of Westminster, in a Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG coupé. I'm sitting on a startlingly comfortable leather recliner, listening to BBC 6 through the Harmon Kardon augmented hifi, and drinking occasionally from a bottle of Tropicana Orange juice. I feel slightly guilty in admitting that, right now, my life is probably a little more rewarding than his.

It's been a slightly strange evening, actually. As you know, the cars I drive are ridiculously diverse; I'd usually be spending my evening in a car worth about one eightieth the value of this one. But tonight, and tonight only, I get to act out my overprivelaged douchebag fantasies.

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Once around the block #1:- 2011 Mercedes SLK

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Manufacturers have an accursed time developing their small sports cars to suit everybody's taste, and Mercedes have had it worse than many with their junior sportster, the SLK.

The first issue, launched in 1996, was criticised for being too overtly effeminate, more at home outside a wine bar than slicing through an alpine pass. As if to counter that, the 2004 replacement took styling cues from the McLaren SLR and had a rear suspension that seemed to be directly connected to my spine.

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Driven #44:- Mercedes-Benz CLS 63 AMG W218

I didn’t do more than 80 on my trip today. I didn’t explore any challenging back roads, didn’t test the standing start acceleration, didn’t even stuff it into a roundabout at Nurburgring speeds. I didn’t need to.

Not so long ago I drove a CLS 350 with the CGi Petrol engine, and spurted much prose in its general direction; claiming that it’s the best car to drive in the CLS Range. Well; it isn’t. Not by a long way. Today I had the enviable task of delivering a customer his brand new, 20 miles on the odometer, CLS 63 AMG.

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101st Post:- Driven Redux

Think of this as a kind of Simpsons hundredth episode clip-show, in which I discuss some of my more noteable drives so far. Of course, I have more on the way, some of which you'd probably never want to own in a million years, but all of which have their place on the blacktop.

Reflecting on the last year, I'd like to have driven rather more cars, if I'm honest. Actually, I've driven more cars than I've written about, but usually not published my thoughts if I didn't get a chance to snap pictures of them. There are also the cars I've driven and written about, but chosen not to upload for political reasons. For example, there's a certain German 4x4 that was so bloody awful that I felt I'd probably be immediately fired if my employers read about it, and then Jeremy Clarkson reviewed the damn thing in the Sunday Times, saying pretty much exactly the same as me anyway. 

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Driven #33:- Mercedes-Benz AMG SLS, Part Two

Fast forward a week. The Glastonbury Festival has been and gone, I have had this years fill of being at one with the trees and the animals, I've let the beat control my body and drank Whiskey from the Jar. It's back to work with a thud and, on my second day back, it was time to make a second 30 mile journey in the SLS.

For whatever reason, when I first drove the SLS I was interested, above all, in finding out what it meant. The ethos of the car, the reasoning behind it, the theory of where it fits into the great scheme of things, all somehow seemed more important than the actual machine itself. Today, for another 30 miles, I am free to concentrate on what it is, rather than why it is.

Whether it ends up as a footnote in history or an important step in automotive evolution, whether SLS's end up used every day or locked away in dusty vaults with Monets and Picassos. The car's worth as an artistic installation is in no doubt whatsoever, but it still remains to be seen whether it lives up to those attention grabbing looks. 

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Driven #33:- Mercedes-Benz AMG SLS, Part One

So, 49 years after the original Mercedes-Benz decided to recapture some of the drama of their original Gullwing, the 300SL.

Of course, the SL has moved on, or rather regressed a long way since the W198 of the ‘50s. At that point the fuel-injected, 150 mph beast was straight out of the annals of science fiction; a costly, hi-tech wonder far beyond the reach of mortal man. But soon, time and progress did their inevitable dance. Mercedes had to broaden the appeal of their flagship, so it got gradually bigger and more practical. And as it got bigger, it required more power. The engines offered on subsequent SLs rose in size through 350, 380, 420, 450, 500 and 560 in R107 shape, which didn’t really have any pretence of sportiness left at all, then up to 600 in the far more on-message R129 of the 'nineties.

Today, the R230 model is far closer to the sporting ideal of the W198, but the 300SL is right down at the bottom of the range, struggling to crack sixty in much less than eight seconds. So, rightly, the new Gullwing has a new name. They call it SLS, and it’s  Mercedes’ signature dish. This is everything the three-pointed-star knows about building a fast car.

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Driven #25:- C63 AMG vs C350CD

The Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG and its less expensive, less specialist little brother, the diesel fuelled C350 CDi Sport live at different reaches of the same price-list. They're salt and pepper, coffee and cream, scotch and soda. One loud and rambunctious, one coldly efficient. Or are they?

My major driving task for today saw me spending serious miles in both cars, looking for some kind of verdict, I didn't quite know what. After a day in two black leather saddles, what had I learnt?

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Driven #17:- Mercedes-Benz S63 AMG

If you're shy and retiring, and a your yearly bonus ain't what it once was, you might well eschew the baroque excess of a Maybach in the knowledge that a long wheelbase S-Class is more than enough luxury car for most people. The extra few inches in wheelbase over the regular car are found in greater rear legroom, all the better for allowing you to relax in the reclining, heated rear seats. Sunlight through the glazed rear roof panel sets the mood, an electric blind for that and all rear windows can be deployed should things get a little too heated. It may run short of the Maybachs electrochromatic roof, but is nicer than the pop-up glass panel in an old Fiesta.

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Power Corrupts, and that's fine.

We have a regular client, well, a trader really but he does snap up the occasional car for personal consumption. As with all well heeled traders who haven't had all the enthusiasm beaten out of them by now, if something interesting crosses the threshold he finds it hard to overcome temptation. He is going through the I-Spy book, gradually ticking the boxes until he has experienced ownership of everything tasty on the menu.

One such vehicle was a CL65 AMG. This, for the uninitiated is an enormous two-door coupe based on the S-Class. Usually it has the same sort of eight-cylinder motivation you'd expect in what the Americans used to refer to as "Personal Luxury" cars. Some had the amplification turned up when AMG bolted on a couple of superchargers to make the CL55.

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