My personal car reviews: Ford Kuga 2.0 TDCi 4x4

MacGuffin said:
Well, the B-Class isn't a real Mercedes to me. I have driven C-Classes, E-Classes, S-Classes, M-Classes and an SLK. Nope, the B-Class is not a real Merc. Neither is the A-Class. They are second cars for wifes of owners of E-Classes.
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Yet they carry Mercedes badges, Mercedes promotes them, and they've got Mercedes price tags.

Weren't you denying that Mercedes had gotten cheap?
 
technically a smart is also a Mercedes Benz it just has a different name (but retains the Merc pricetag)
Although I would rate it much much higher than the A class (dunno about B, haven't driven it)
 
You're right that the Kuga is the best-looking "small" SUV. But that's just saying it looks the least horrible of them.

All Ford designers should have a good look at the Taunus P7 before styling their next car. Heck, every carmakers's design department (except VW's) should have a look at what they put out in the mid-70s before going back to the drawing board. The Taunus, the Kadett, the Land Rover (ok, they still make that), the Lagonda, the list goes on and on.
 
Spectre said:
Yet they carry Mercedes badges, Mercedes promotes them, and they've got Mercedes price tags.

Weren't you denying that Mercedes had gotten cheap?
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All my statements are free for interpretation and usually you do a very creative job in interpreting them in the most interesting and entertaining ways :D

But yes, the A- and B-Class wear the badge but they aren't real Mercedes-Benz cars to me. Mainly because they were afterthoughts, to not let the competition make profit with cars of that size exclusively.

With the A-Class, Mercedes tried to offer an alternative to the Golf -- and failed. Badly. I don't even know, if they ever made profit with the A-Class. And the B-Class is a kind of middle-thing, nothing half and nothing whole to be honest. Let the French do the excentric cars with exotic technical solutions. Mercedes doesn't need that. Besides, the French always fail with it economically. Mercedes-Benz shouldn't look at what others do, they should be the trend setters others look at as an example.

On the other hand, the German car industry was only able to fight off the "Asian attack" with their own means -- the only Western country who managed to do that, btw. --, because Audi and BMW wanted to beat Mercedes in the 1980's and 1990's. As a result we now have three strong, competing premium brands and as long as they keep trying to top each other, it's also good for the rest of the car world.

So yes, in parts Mercedes has become cheap in certain ways. But as Jaguar fans also do not like everything that is/was sold under the badge of the growling cat (*cough* Ford Mondeo *cough*), Merc fans also don't have to love everything they come up with in crazy Stuttgart.

Actually it's quite easy to live with the inner contradictions of Mercedes, because under the three-pointed star you can also find vans, utility vehicles, trucks, military vehicles, ambulances, the Unimog, etc. No one ever complained about that, as far as I know...
 
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It was a B180, but running on regular gas. The A- and B-Classes are probably just popular with my customers because they can't get them in the states, so they are kinda exotic.

Since the last facelift (or MoPf in german, short for Modellpflege) the A-Class is actually a quite decent car. I had one for a month as company car and I actually did like it. The stability control has been vastly improved, now it's limits are pretty much similar to what you get with other cars in it's class (e.g. Ford Focus, Opel Astra, VW Golf), so it doesn't kill all the fun. Drove one in 2005 and that was really horrible, the stability control would kick when you just thought about cornering. It would jump back and forth between stability-control-induced oversteer and understeer, it was kinda like the stability control couldn't decide what to do, for example when you are negotiating a righthander: "Oh noes, we're going to spin! Go-go-gadget left front and rear right brake calipers! - ZOMG now were going straight for the woods, go-go-gadget front right and rear left brake calipers! - Oh noes, we're going to spin..."
That meant that you were pretty much stuttering around corners at around 0.8 G, when I remember my data correctly.

But that's different nowadays. As I already mentioned today it's pretty much like a Golf, you can have all the fun as long as you keep it stable. But still both cars kill all the fun once you try trailbraking or anything similar, fast chicanes tick 'em off, too. And now, since it's cold and wet, even the traction control keeps annoying me and can't be disabled completly.

Errrmmmm, got a bit sidetracked with the electronic fun preventers. Anyway, as a city runabout or daily driver for the average driver these cars do a decent job. The A- and B-classes may not be as good as the real-wheel-drive (that's not a typo!) Mercedes-Benz cars, but they do the job and actually offer some of the Mercedes qualities like getting you from A to B in a very relaxing way.
 
^ Sounds like they got the elks out of the system.
 
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