Cars, like other products were flawed due to technical limitations, but recent American cars (and even lower priced Japanese ones) are built very cheaply. I was amazed how bad a new Ford Focus was that I rented. There is not even an attempt for craftsmanship, quality in materials used, or to manufacture technical excellence.

That is why European cars will always be the best because they strive to be the best that they can. A Volvo or VW is designed to be good. An American Ford or GM is designed to be mediocre.

If I could wave a magic wand I’d have my Renault R12, Saab 99 Turbo, Audi Quattro Coupe, Dasher Diesel Coupe, Dodge GLH Turbo, Volvo 960 sedan and in fact all my cars come back into my life.

Quite a list of imperfect vehicles but somehow they all appealed to me :-) I’ve super memories of each and most of these are good…

Only totaled one, a 1st gen Rabbit Champagne Edition. Going to work early one rainy NH morning, on a beautiful downhill sweeper I drifted, classic fwd full lock understeer, nose first into a really BIG oak tree. Half in a daze I watched the VW’s vital fluids carried away by the roads watery runoff in a blaze of color.

And have only once seen German Shepards barking at my driver side window… 106 MPH (radar confirmed) in my GLH Turbo coming back from skiing late one night on a mostly deserted Vermont Rt 91… oh yeah, the state troopers (3 cars) weren’t amused).

Let’s celebrate all cars… every last one ever made and let’s hope that warts and all, our choices are more numerous in the future then in our past.

While a new one isn’t priced like a Genesis, GS350 or LaCrosse if you’re looking for an E and don’t want to pay sticker than the ’07’s and ’08’s are good values.

———————————–

Whenever I hear “slightly used car A is better than brand new car B”, I know car A is junk (or at least crappy value for the price).

How about a comparison between a slightly used Genesis vs. brand new E?

What I find interesting is that a couple of posters felt that because a Hyundai Genesis got 5 star crash ratings that it’s every bit as safe as a Mercedes.
——————-

Why not? Just because MB is built by Caucasians?

Sure, IIHS may not have been the ultimate source for car safety. But if you want to refute its results, at least give us something more concrete. Such as “IIHS said this, but research papers showed otherwise”, or Germans use “XX” as their preferred source for auto safety. Instead, you gave us something you imagined.

Since the Genesis beats/matches the E in low speed collision, and beats the E in reliability. It’s obvious that the Genesis is better engineered. Chances are, until further data is provided, the Genesis can beat the E in high speed collision as well.

While it might be comfortable for some to long for the good old days of cars like my ‘67 250SL, ‘79 300D, ‘84 190E 2.3 16 or ‘93 500SL I’ve got to tell you that while they were all good cars so to was my son’s ‘02 C230 Kompressor and the ‘05 CLK55 AMG Cabriolet and ‘07 E350 (Sport) that the wife and I drive today. In fact beyond just routine service (yes it is more expensive than most) I’ve had only a couple small items on the CLK that needed to be taken care of under warranty. The E350 has been the most reliable car we’ve ever owned period… it’s only been to the dealer 3 times in 3 years and only then for scheduled maintenance.

With regards to the new W212 seems to me to be another good Mercedes… lots to like with no particularly awful flaws. OK it doesn’t have the steering precision of a Black Series car so maybe that should be an option. While a new one isn’t priced like a Genesis, GS350 or LaCrosse if you’re looking for an E and don’t want to pay sticker than the ’07’s and ’08’s are good values.

So, what do I like about my ‘07 E350… overall balanced driveability (acceleration, handling, braking, and comfort), quality of the materials and workmanship (paint and interior fit / finish are particularly nice), gas mileage (22 average, high teens city, high twenty’s highway), and it’s traditionally styled good looks (many nice comments from friends and acquaintances over the last 3 years).

I am afraid that my only answer is that the shifter should be there because that is what I’m used to.

Really, you could use that space for more storage or a fancy interface device. You could move some controls from a less accessible area to the console. I’m sure that designers could come up with a lot of things to put there, some of which may actually be a good idea.

If Hertz gave me a car with the shifter somewhere else, it would take some time getting used to the new location. But as long as the new location and/or method didn’t suck, I would be fine with it.

The E class is spacious, has high grade materials, is definitely georgeous and its cost is fair considering what you’re getting.
———

As compared to your S550, yes. As compared to some of the better cars out there, no.

Why not? Bench seats were never much good for comfort and support anyways, bucket seats are much better. Most cars have some sort of hump in the floor so the middle position was never comfortable for people with legs. If you have 2 buckets seats you might as well have a console, and what better place to put the shifter?

The Feds may have killed the old time push button shifters, but fact is that they were notoriously unreliable when compared to more conventional shifter designs.

Yes, a floor mounted shifter doesn’t make sense in luxury cars with automatic trans.

The Caddy had 190 lb-ft of torque the Mercedes had 188 lb-ft.

If you owned a E class for 20 years, you mechanic’s son/daughter would have graduated from collage with the money spend on maintenece.

Not in my experience, nor the experience of two friends. All of us were long term, high mileage drivers of the W123, W124, and W201 (190e for those that don’t remember) and combined we have easily driven these cars (both diesel and gas) around 1 million miles.

My W124 E300D, for example, died an early and untimely death at just under 500K miles. (flooded street = flooded parked Benz). During it’s life, the brakes were replaced twice, shocks once, the steering mechanism needed a shock absorber (who would have thought to design something like this in?) and the rear suspension had it’s bushings replaced at 400K. So, about $4000 in repairs, plus routine maintenance over 12 years and 500K miles.

This isn’t expensive at all. How many cars on the road can even GET to 500K miles?

As a side note, at 500K my car still looked new, and the interior still fresh if slightly square.

Sure, the new E-Class is ugly. Really ugly. OK, REALLY REALLY ugly. But I bet it will be on the road longer than most of the competition, including the Genesis mentioned by so many.

Side observation: Today I defended Hyundai in a long post about 4-cyl family cars, and now I am sort of bashing the Genesis for not being a Benz. I hope it does not come across as hypocritical, but they are two very different beasts at two very different price points.;

Basically, the least safe 5-star car can have close to 3x the risk as the most safe, so stars on their own really don’t tell you much (but makes it all the more confusing as to why he doesn’t use the raw data from IIHS but does use it from NHTSA). Neither NHTSA or IIHS consider mass, so that was another of his goals. He also gives weight to having features like ESC.

The most important thing he does, IMHO, is to weight the different tests by how dangerous that type of scenerio is. Most people would like at front, rear, and side impact scores and give them equal consideration. However, frontal impacs cause 38% of fatalities, rollover 33%, side 26% and rear impacts only 3% of fatalities, so something can have great front and rear impact ratings and still be unsafe. His formula is the best I’ve yet seen for combining all these variables and expressing them as one safety number.

It’s just one guy who does this with his free time as a service, and the system needs improvement, but I think overall it’s very good. He just needs an alternative to plugging in median scores to areas where the car wasn’t tested, and needs to use the IIHS raw data (I think the IIHS raw data wasn’t availabe when he started, so he might not be aware of it).

What do you know…he replied to me just as I was writing. I’ll post his reply, but I suggest you contact him as well at infor@informedforlife.org

Here’s part of his reply, regarding substituting average values for areas where a vehicle wasn’t tested…

[i]The probelm of incomplete data is a fundamental issue when trying to compare vehicles with different levels of completeness. The approach I have adopted is a conservative one where using “average” values tends to drive overall SCORES with missing data towards the value = 100. Since I recommend that you only consider vehicles with SCOREs less than 65 the only way a vehcile can achieve this is to have sufficent data to “earn” a reduction in SCORE. In other words, I am more concerned that consumers pick a “safe” vehicle than in comparing vehicle A vs. Vehcile B. Also, the approach I have taken is simple to implement and understand, and is objective. Any contrived way of filling in blanks, no matter how well intended, would result in complaints of some sort of bias. My primary objective is to provide a means for the average consumer to identify vehicles that are safe!

Sincerely,

Michael D. Dulberger
Founder and President
Informed For Life, Inc.
a Connecticut nonprofit organization
email: info@InformedForLife.org
website: http://www.InformedForLife.org
[/i]

I disagree with him, but he does make a thought-out case. It would be a mess if ifs, ands, or buts if he had a complex forumla of how to fill in blank areas.

I still have bad feelings about that wesite. Both the NHTSA and IIHS publish the actual measurements from the frontal crash tests in addition to their star rating system. When you are developing a complicated formula based on test data from other sources, you should not use their summary. You should use their actual data.

In the end, however, I feel that their rating system can be further simplified – buy the heaviest 5-star rated car you can afford. So many cars in lots of price categories get 5 star safety ratings, so that should work for pretty much anyone that puts a high enough priority on safety.

I am a bit shocked that manufacturers are still having difficulty getting good side impact scores, especially a company like Mercedes.

I am surprised how many people do not understand how the average automatic transmission is gated, whether it is a floor shift or a column. Now before I get started explaining such, lets throw out the button-less euro shifters with the obvious shift gating, if you can’t see what is in front of your eyes I can’t help you there. Also anyone in their early 20’s or younger gets a pass here since manumatics and 5/6-speed autos have caused a lot of divergence in shifter operation.

With that said…first of all the button push (or the pull-forward release of the column shifter, I will use both interchangably from here forward) is not a release that opens all gears and locks out all gears when you let go of the button. If you hold down the button it is, but not all gates need the “release” to shift between. If you pay attention you will notice some general rules:

1. You can shift between D and N freely. This is a sort of safety feature, if something goes wrong, stuck throttle, racing engine, etc. netural is only a tap of the shifter away.

2. The button push needed to shift in and out of P is the deepest button push. When shifting from D to say, R, you do not need to push the button(or pull the lever) as far as you need to when you shift from D to P. Hmm this might be useful…

3. Now you might be imaginging that the gates are “stepped” and you would be right. Hence the last rule, you can shift from R into N, and hence to D, without pushing the button. Furthermore, you need to push the button to shift below D, say to 3-2-1 etc.

So now that you know some rules, you can put that together into the most common shift actions, which you can do quickly, without the “push, fiddle, release” action of your less mechanically inclined brethren:

1. P to D – Pull the lever down to get out of park but then immediately release it forward while you keep on yanking that lever down…wow look at that it magically stops on D!! It’s like the engineers knew I would be using that one alot

2. R to D – Can’t mess this one up, just yank that lever down.

3. D to R – OK this is where it gets more difficult, you might need to practice this one a bit. What you do is push the button just a bit, not quite enough to get you into P. When you get this one right, you’ll know, you will go smoothly from D through N and into R, an magically stop at R. This one is very useful if you get stuck in some mud.

4. P to R – This is the hardest of all, you have to push the button deep to get out of park, but it is easy to overshoot to N and if you release the button you’ve missed it. You can either release the button early, and take it slow to R, or you can learn push the button with less force, so it sort of “pops up” to the R button height as you pass R. Then if you overshoot to N you just push back the other way and you are in!

5. D/R to P – There is not trick here, just go for it.

The last is worth mentioning though, because these 5 actions have to be 99.9% of what anyone ever does with their shifter, whether column or console. Everythig else isn’t as easy, but not a daily occurence either.

It is true the advent of 4-speed automatics did change the landscape of shifter operation, especially electronic automatics where the mechanism could remain the same, and locking out 4th could be then accomplished by a button, as Ford, Chrysler and the Japanese Imports generally did. GM went their own way and just added an “OD” to replace what used to be D, no change in technique needed there.

Then you have Honda…they decided to make a D4 and D3, which you could move between openly just as you could from D to N per my shifter rules. I found that my Dad, who had simply intuitively learned the rules of shifter gates over the years, was driving around in D3 with his Acura for some time before I showed him what had happened.

Modern shifters seem to be losing this logic. I went to a wedding this weekend, and a out of town guest was describing how she drove her Subaru Legacy rental in manual mode all the way from Logan to Cape Cod because she couldn’t figure out how to get to normal automatic mode. I looked at the shifter, just a subtle push to the right would have done it.

I too have mixed feelings about this- it can really screw the ratings up. But, the site author thought doing it this way was better than basing the score on one data point.

Also, the 09 E-class didn’t do as well as the Genesis on side-impact IIHS crash, although it did a bit better on the IIHS frontal. Being only “acceptable” in side impact kept if out of the top safety pic catagory. In NHTSA, which uses different kinds of barriers, the Genesis significantly beat the E on frontal, but slightly lost on side.

Last few yrs being on the upper end of Motoring, he said these newer cars doesnot instill enough confidence to hop in & drive 5-600 miles trip.
His 88 E320 had refused to run one time in midle of the trip, he called the ” Warranty ” they were more than happy to dispatch a flat deck on his behalf and the cost would be bear by Merc too. But when u get all excited to go for a trip u dont wanna to end up in a Budget rent a car?

With a few mths old Porsche his water cooled engine gave up his Ghost prematurely, something jammed inside the engine, just like when Indiana Jones jam to spear into the Front wheel of the German Wermacht bike that was pursuing him unrelentlessly. All comes to a grinding halt.
The dealer didnt question him much at all, they kind of had the voluntary assumption of guilt.
Normally they kind of wont admit anything until the Supreme Court Judge ruled out of their favour!

His new SL500, one day decided to behave like a wet dog, and move the the beat of ” A whole lot of shakin going on ” by Jerry Lewis ( correct me if wong ” Or the engine was shaking just as wildly as Elvis the Pelvis.

So what is the incentive to buy one of these?

And then one of these educated buyer think my 90 300se with 180,000 miles is ready for the junk yard. I told him 180 is nothing for a Merc.They should last for a million miles. If not 1/2 mil. He didnt think so. I thought atleast the older Mercs were suppose to built as strong /tough as the Panzer wagen.
Is kind of looking like Merc had been under sieged badly kind of sounds like Barbarians were inside the gate. Buzzards had been circling hard from above.

The E class is spacious, has high grade materials, is definitely georgeous and its cost is fair considering what you’re getting.

@ psarhjinian: 1. Cost. You get to keep the same console design and floor.

2. Column shifters are irritating to use. it’s far too easy to overshoot your intended gear.

The first is not historically true, in American cars, at least. Except for the Corvette and the Mustang, the large majority of American cars from 1939 to 1969 had column shifters, automatic or manual. You paid extra for a console or bucket seats, and you sometimes paid extra for a floor shifter, as well. Until the seventies, European cars rarely had automatics and seldom had consoles in the modern sense. I think the popularity of consoles and console shifters has been primarily because they looked “sporty” — for American buyers, you could look like you had a four-on-the-floor and still have an automatic.

2 is true, although many floor shifters aren’t very accurate, either. I’ve seen some Powerglide floor shifters, for instance, where the quadrant position either wasn’t lighted or where the lever didn’t line up with the indicators. There’s a reason why the old Hurst Dual-Gate became popular in the late sixties, and why Mercedes had their ratchet shifter.

The old Chrysler pushbutton approach was positive, certainly, but stabbing buttons with your left hand wasn’t necessarily convenient, either. Manual shifting took deliberation, lest you accidentally punch N or R. (Racers would put blocking plates over those buttons so they wouldn’t hit them by accident.) The reason Chrysler dropped it is that they started hearing from dealers that buyers who hadn’t driven a Chrysler product before were wary of the buttons. (They were reliable enough, since they were just mechanical; it wasn’t like the Edsel “Teletouch” electric shifter, which was disastrous.)

However, the problem with the Old E class the W 124 is that it was as overpriced as it was underpowered (esp. the old 177 HP v6 and the even weaker 2.6).

Keep in mind it was 1986 – at that time the 4.1L V-8 in a Caddy made 135bhp.”

First, HP is half the story, the torque waS MUCH higher in domestics with puny HP, and TOrque is what matters in acceleration. Also, the Caddy was FAR FAR Cheaper than the ridiculously overpriced Merc.

Second, 1986 or 87 was also the year that 300 HP BMW 750iL made its debut.

We should compare apples to apples and not apples to cheap domestics, especially if we do not mention the all-important TORQUE.

I’ve driven all sorts of cars for long journeys (I define that as over 5 hour one way) and the Mercedes is the one I would prefer to be driving if I was driving more than 5 hours. My acid test is how to I feel when I reach my destination. BMWs, Cadillacs, big SUVs, Audi’s all left me tired and sore after a long drive. Mercedes, get out, stretch, do whatever you need to do.

And I do love the way they feel on the road. They are no BMW, but on the long haul a Benz is easier to drive.

As the proud owner of 2 W124s I am glad that Mercedes seems to be back on the path towards quality. However, until they make a comparably engineered model, I think I will stick to my old faithfuls..

Keep in mind it was 1986 – at that time the 4.1L V-8 in a Caddy made 135bhp.