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Not just another Hybrid from Mercedes-Benz

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Operating the throttle in the new Mercedes-Benz C 300 BlueTEC Hybrid Sport Saloon feels a little like tickling fish.

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Every time you apply a feather pressure with your foot on the pedal while travelling at normal road speeds, the car springs and leaps like a startled salmon.

 

This is scarcely what we have learned to expect from a hybrid, still less a diesel hybrid. That combination would normally lead you to expect the stolid, sullen, smut-coated virtues you might find in the railway locomotives’ shunting yard. Startling torque, allied with a silken powertrain are hardly the characteristics we mentally associate with – to give an arbitrary example – a Toyota Prius.

But, where Toyota/Lexus have been at the top of the hybrid tree for the last decade, Mercedes have now taken over the commanding heights in that technology. Their S400 hybrid has a fair claim to be the best car in the world at present – with powers as rapturously sumptuous as its comforts. And now their new C-Class hybrid combines the sterling qualities of a 200 bhp four-cylinder common rail diesel with twin turbochargers together with a compact, high efficiency 27 hp electric motor.

Put these two together and you get sensational torque or pulling power, amounting to 500 NM at 1800 rpm. More significantly, so far as business users are concerned, this combination of powers produces CO2 as low as 94 g/km which makes the car exceptionally attractive, compared with its rivals, so far as business taxes go.

Like others at the cheaper end of the Mercedes range, this diesel can be a noisy clonker at lower speeds which comes as a nasty jolt after you have moved off in serene silence under the power of the electric motor. However, the drivetrain has the lovely habit of shutting down the diesel when you lift off the accelerator, which returns the cabin to its sepulchral peace. Until the next time you give the accelerator a poke.

Build quality and interior finish on the new C-Class seem to be back to something like the levels we expected of Mercedes-Benz before they entered their fatal 10-year liaison with Chrysler in 1998 and standards plummeted. Doubts and worries over the long-term life of the electric motors in hybrids seem to have faded in the face of evidence that they appear to be lasting longer and with greater reliablility than was initially expected.

But there remains a fractional uncertainty over this technology which might hold back a more conservative customer for this car – perhaps until the first J.D. Power survey results are published?

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Specs of model driven – C 300 BlueTEC HYBRID SPORT SALOON

Base Price: £36,625.00, price as tested £42,230.00

Engine: 2143cc inline Common-rail diesel with twin turbochargers
Transmission: 7G Tronic Plus seven speed automatic transmission
Rated Output: 204hp @ 3800rpm
Torque: 500Nm @ 1600-1800rpm
0-62mph: 6.4 seconds
Top speed: 152mph
Fuel economy urban/extra-urban/combined: 72.4/83.1/78.5mpg
CO2 emissions: 99g/km

Boot Capacity: 480 litres
Length – 4686mm
Width – 1810mm
Height – 1442mm

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