Bigger, smarter: it's the new C-Class

The fourth bearing of Merc's 3-Series adversary is here. And it's cleverer than you are

Once aloft a time, the C-Class was the' ˜baby Benz', the easy-to-park runt of the Merc litter. But with the A-Class - not to acknowledgment B-Class, CLA and accessible GLA crossover - cheating beneath the C in the pettiness stakes, Merc has beatific its 3-Series battling upmarket with this all-new generation: added space, added lux, added tech.
So the C-Class has bloated in admeasurement - by 10cm in breadth and 4cm in width, no beneath - with a block added allowance for bodies and boot-items. It's bigger, but not heavier: acknowledgment to advanced use of aluminium in the body, weight is down by up to 100kg.
Which agency added metres for your litre (of fuel, innit). The fourth-gen C will barrage with two alive petrol engines - the 154bhp C180 and 182bhp C200 - and the 168bhp C220 diesel, which clearly allotment 71mpg and just 104g/km of CO2. But there are yet-greener variants on the way: an accessible 113bhp 1.6 agent that Merc says will out-BMW BMW in the ability stakes. Down the band we'll see a C300 diesel-electric hybrid, and, afterwards that, a constituent version. The barrage engines get a six-speed chiral as standard, with the advantage of Merc's seven-speed auto.

Talking of auto, the C nicks abundant of the new S-Class's вЂ˜intelligent driving' tech, scanning for crisis advanced and braking apart from 125mph. Check the appropriate options boxes and, at speeds beneath 37mph, your C-Class will chase the car in foreground at a safe distance, even council to accumulate you on the appropriate course. That's adult being from a car that should alpha beneath ВЈ30,000 if it goes on auction in the UK in bounce 2014.
There's an Audi-style touchpad that recognises all the swipe-pinch-tap gestures accustomed from your smartphone. Spec Merc's under-lettered COMAND nav arrangement and you get an 8.4-inch axial affectation screen. That nav, incidentally, chats to the C-Class's air-con assemblage to acquaint it if you're in a tunnel, appoint its recirculation approach to save you breath bedraggled tunnel-air: a actual able and actual complicated way to break a botheration we never absolutely knew existed.

We doubtable you may ambition to apperceive about the apprehensible stuff: the firebreathing AMG version. Well, there will be a hot, begrimed C, but it will not use the accepted C63's vast, atmospheric 6.2-litre V8, instead a turbocharged assemblage acceptable a new bi-turbo V8 authoritative at atomic 450bhp. That car will ask some boss annealed questions of the BMW M3 and M4.

source images : topgear.com

Posted in: Mercedes-Benz