Seating for four is comfy unless the rear riders are tall of torso or hairdo, in which case the roofline's inch-lower sleekness will present an interference fit. Inside there's a sporty three-nacelle instrument binnacle, a unique three-spoke steering wheel, and genuine aluminum trim. Claar's friends in the budget office helped him nab the four-door's optional Sport-package suspension as standard equipment and scored all-new exterior sheetmetal, bent into a much more raffish shape. Yes, the seats of the base car are cloth-upholstered and manually adjusted, but the 318ti used a cheaper outdated rear suspension and different and cheaper switchgear, and shared the sedan's front-end sheetmetal unaltered. And the base price of $25,595 - $5000 less than a C240 - indicates deep de-contenting, as with the BMW, which sold at a similar discount.īut maybe Claar had allies deep in the organization that helped him to make lemonade of this lemon assignment, because the cost cutting seems less obvious. The sports coupe gets a four-banger, while the rest of the C-class (and 3-series) lineup has graduated to sixes. The Benz's hatch surgery slices off 7.3 inches of length (the BMW lost 8.8 inches), trading the sedan's 12 cubic feet of enclosed trunk space for 10, to 38 cubes of hatch versatility.
Yikes.Ĭomparisons of the new C230 sports coupe with the ill-fated BMW 318ti are inevitable.
How else could he have been stuck with developing a C-class hatchback for the United States of Sedan-dom - the very nation that rejected a version of the wildly popular BMW 3-series that had been given a Gremlin chop? Talk about setting someone up for the big career crash. Had a few too many Maß beers at the Cannstatter Volksfest and spilled bubespitzle down the boss's wife's blouse. Maybe Klaus-Peter Claar got crosswise with DaimlerChrysler's board of management.
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