Driven #47:- 2011 Mercedes-Benz Viano Edition 125 V6 CDi 3.0

Firstly an issue that applies now every bit as much as it did when I drove the other one. Let's get this straight; Mercedes-Benz are marketing this as basically a grown-up minivan. Well, I'll challenge that and say that a grown-up minivan is, well, a van. You can even buy this vehicle from M-B Commercial Vehicle outlets with a Vito badge attached in place of the Viano one. I say stop the madness and admit that this car is, basically, a Van. And a very good one at that.

Last time I spent time with a Viano it was a fairly prosaic, four cylinder Ambiente model. As a way of carrying groups of people around it did an excellent job, somehow more professional, more businesslike than how a similarly capacious Chrysler Grand Voyager always comes across. I enjoyed driving it, as you probably surmised from my report. But it had me wondering what it would have been like if it had been blessed with a little more power.

Today I found out, with the indecently rapid CDI 3.0.

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Driven #46:- 2011 Mercedes-Benz CL500

 

The current generation Mercedes-Benz CL500 (CL550 in some markets) is absolutely glorious. It offers a lot of the exquisite comfort of an S-Class with a big injection of added indulgence. It's also almost preposterously quick, the 4.6 litre V8 thumping out 435 growly, thunderous horsepower, enough to hurl the vast machine to sixty in less than five seconds. To put this into perspective, that's only a second slower than the AMG CL65; and that has an extra 177 horses and costs a further fifty grand.

In all honesty, it was never really in doubt that the CL was a bit of a masterpiece. I mean, it would be absolutely criminal for the flagship Mercedes coupé to be anything less. But what really struck me about my time with the CL, for all its pleasure, for all that power, was how many systems it has to take your mind off driving it.

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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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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 #27:- Mercedes-Benz AMG E63

Sometimes my job is a very wonderful thing indeed. Aside from my more mundane duties, which I like to believe that I carry out uncomplainingly and with aplomb, sometimes I am placed in a special position of trust for which I am very grateful. To my employers; sincerely, I thank you.

For example, last weekend I had to drive over 500 miles into Scotland in a Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG before making the return journey in an equally interesting machine. And as I type these words I realise that I have absolutely no right whatsoever to whinge about work ever again.

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Mercedes-Benz; Backwards to the future?

“Engineered like no other car” was Clint Eastwood's verdict after driving a Mercedes SL off a rooftop in buddy-cop thriller The Rookie. And he was right, certainly by 1990 standards. His were commercially lucrative words; the R129 generation SL was a brand new car; the previous R107 having been produced for an impressive 16 years. After such cosy familiarity, the new order would take some getting used to. The new car needed some heavyweight promotion behind it and Mercedes-Benz were delighted by this opportunity

In my previous article about the A-Class, I questioned the notion of Mercedes-Benz-ness. And, with unprecedented predictability, today's feature car sums up my view.

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A badge is a badge. Mercedes-Benz’s adventures in the world of small.

When Mercedes-Benz first released the 190E in 1983 it was marketed as the new “small Mercedes”. Small for a Mercedes, maybe, but still so big that it left a whole sector of the market completely untapped.

To bring the fight to this battleground the first Mercedes A-Class was released in 1997 to a background of intrigue and wonderment. Mercedes were, for the first time ever, chasing the real small car market. 

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A Project Too Far

It's better to regret something you have done, than something you haven't done. 

This sentiment rings loud in my mind as I write this in hope of catharsis, to sooth the aches of regret that currently course through every vein in my body, for I have just had to turn down the project I always wanted. 

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The Monster Retreats.

The Automotive world has a rich history of imitation, emulation, inspiration and outright forgery. Back in the seventies the Rover SD1 famously borrowed aspects of the Ferrari 365GTB/4, a successful endeavour which led to one of the most striking regular cars of the decade. At around that time De Tomaso were obviously dead keen on the Jaguar XJ6 as the lines of the Deauville demonstrated, and fifteen years later Toyota realised that the only way to beat the Germans at their own game was to base their product on a tried and tested formula. They chose the Mercedes S-Class and the resulting brand, Lexus, has been spectacularly successful.

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Driven #2:- Mercedes Viano.

Working at Mercedes, if a Sales enquiry comes in about the Viano, I tend to shrug my shoulders and pass the responsibility onto a commercial vehicles specialist a couple of miles down the road. We don't really deal with Vianos very often, they take up a lot of showroom floorspace, enquiry levels are low and they're a lot more expensive than people think.

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