MERCEDES-BENZ B CLASS B180 CDI SE 5dr (2008)
Merc B Class - A step up from the Zafira/Galaxy crowd
Yeah I got the B-Class obviously as a bit of a half way house compromise between giving up on life completely with an ultra boring dad-mobile, and stubbornly clinging on to my Golf like we didn't actually have two kids who need safely transporting around. It's worked out ok, it's a Merc so they know how to put some punch into it, but at the end of the day it is a pretty watered down Merc and not to be bought expecting the drive of your life. It's a safe and fairly reliable machine with a good brand on it and a fair chance of not falling to pieces. Can you tell I'm bitter about selling the Golf??
Right, good stuff about it... well first of all it's really massive, which I have to admit has been a bit of a god send with the kids really. Fiddling about in the back of a three door fitting up child seats was never a joy, and although it's still hardly a joy the B-Class certainly makes life a lot easier, not only on account of having five doors but also being a fair bit higher up. The boot is also easily big enough to swallow the littlun's buggy and the not so littlun's bike, plus all the other endless gubbins you need to take two kids out for the day.
It's got some other bells and whistles that make you feel like a bit of a dunce at first but are actually kinda handy, like the parking sensor doowackies that tell you how close you are to stuff. I don't mind admitting I took out my tail lights a few times in my old car, and I reckon this would probably have saved that bill.
The fact that the seats all just flip down and disappear is also kind of cool, makes it easy to get all my surfing gear in there. In fact I've had mine and two other people's in there, plus the two other people. Not bad really. You can also adjust the height of the floor which is handy. It's had a few mechanical faults though, including a recall, which hardly added confidence. They were all done inside the original warranty but still, not great for a car this pricey, and just not what you expect from a Merc.
We got the diesel version cos we wanted to save money on fuel. That's been fine really, and these days there doesn't seem much difference power wise. Bit noisy at low speeds, when idling, but otherwise fine. It's pretty easy to drive, actually it's really stupidly easy to drive. The only things are that it can blow about a little bit in high winds, but it's a tall car so no real way around that. And it's a little bit long, the nose pokes out quite a way, but probably better than driving a Voyager or something, which just looks like a giant egg.