Correction: Not All A-Class Diesels Are French
They don’t call you guys the Best&Brightest for nothing, I tell ya.
When I complained that Mercedes-Benz was using Renault-sourced diesel engines in its small cars, one of our Deutschland-based readers disagreed with my “facts”. Which is fair, because I got my facts from a variety of US-based auto media, and he’s getting his from, well, Germany.
The “OM651” referred to in that image is the new-ish family of four-cylinder Benz diesels, which appears in at least three different variants across the A-class range. The “OM640” diesel is the Renault one, available in the A180 hatchback as a relatively low-output one-and-a-half-liter. Alright, so it turns out that you can still rock in America get a Mercedes diesel in the cheap Mercedes sedan. Where things get a little strange, however, is with this fact: the E250 diesel that’s arriving on our shores now packs a 2.1-liter OM651 and is fully EPA-compliant. So this isn’t even a matter of figuring out how to make the engine work over here; it’s simply a matter of adding a urea tank somewhere in the CLA.
How about the trunk?
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"The OM640 diesel is the Renault one" No, it is not. How about getting things right for once? The OM640 was the old four cylinder Mercedes diesel from 2001. The OM651 from 2009 is the one they're shoving in the upper C class E class, and upper A and B class cars. The OM607 is the Renault one Mercedes is shoving in the stripper C, A, B and CLA. Five minutes on Google to find this info, it's hardly a secret. And Mercedes want you to know they were in charge of the application changes needed to fit it in their cars. They didn't rely on Renault for that! Gottin Himmel - ve have our pride!
The OM640 is a Benz engine. The OM607 is Renault-based. It has 1.5l and is currently used only in the manual gearbox versions of the A160CDI and A180CDI as well as the B160CDI and B180CDI.