Mercedes C180 CGi Sport

C 180 CGI BlueEFFICIENCY 

ESTATE SPORT

The other week I was kindly lent a C Class Estate. The timing couldn’t have been better, as I was due to take my son to Liverpool to watch the second leg of the Europa cup Quarter final, Liverpool V Benfica at Anfield.

After spending a few minutes acclimatizing, myself to the controls and a few calls to the Mercedes Benz press office when trying to set up the hands free on my mobile phone, we set off.

Driving on the motorway was very easy and even after 4 hours with a few stops I still arrived in the Wirral, not as tired as I had expected.

The trip to Anfield went well, Car left safely at a relative’s house in the Wirral and the new form of transport the train and the bus. Even better, Liverpool won 4-1.

Living with the car.

When designing this car Mercedes clearly set out to produce a car that would be a load lugger as well as a relaxing drive on the Motorway.

With its 485 litre boot with the rear seats up and 1500 litre with them down, there is plenty of space to fit a shopping or larger items.

Performance wise, the car handles well and the acceleration from 1796 CC petrol engine is very good. With the 5 speed automatic gearbox you have three settings, officially called Comfort, Standard and Manual, manual being operated by the paddles on the steering wheel. I should say manual with nanny holding your hand, because if you dare to try to change up or down and the car feels, it’s a step to far. It is simple. You can’t. “As nanny knows best”.

You can also change up or down using the “gear shift”; I use the term loosely as this is the stick as with other autos where a manual shift normally is.

In terms of performance figures the official 0-62 is 9.2 secs and in terms of Fuel consumption I returned an average of 36 miles per gallon, but when driven through the country lanes in the S mode of auto box this dropped down to around 26 mpg.

Mercedes Benz call S standard mode, but quite frankly I think of it as sports mode as the car becomes far more responsive when the accelerator peddle is depressed and holds on to a gear much longer before changing up, which is great when you need to over take.

The Merc comes with all the usual luxury trappings, Cruise control, SatNav, plugs to connect with MP3 player, climate control and of course Bluetooth hands free for the phone.

The SatNav was very interesting to use as this also included a traffic message channel and if there any holdups ahead, it would suddenly reroute you, as happened to us coming up the M5. We heard there was a hold up beyond Junc 1, clearly so did the satnav, as it suddenly told us to get off at Junction 1 and took us through the back streets of Wednesbury, finally joining the M6 at Junc 9.

We also had another run in with the satnav on the way back. It decided I should drive on M6 toll road, I decided otherwise and wanted to go back on M6 and M5 before heading onto the M40.

I spent the next 3 junctions with the Satnav telling me to get off the motorway and go through the Centre of Birmingham. I don’t think so. Finally after junc 3 it decided to go my route and promptly knocked 20 miles off the journey.

Generally I thought the car was a great car to live with and really enjoyed driving it, but in terms of Torque I would be very interested to know how the Diesel version of this car performed, and especially the fuel performance