MERCEDES-BENZ C300

HAVE YOU ever paused to wonder why there aren’t any small luxury cars? You know, all of the features and quality of an expensive car only poured into a more conveniently sized package? The reason you tend not to see these cars is the same reason why you don’t expect a large car to handle as crisply as a smaller, lighter one: physics.

Put simply, a small car will never travel down the road with the comportment of a large one. It can’t. Its wheelbase is shorter, the sprung to unsprung mass ratios are different and so on. So when Mercedes-Benz informed us that the next generation C-Class aimed to deliver the luxury of the S-Class limousine in a smaller package, you can perhaps forgive a little initial cynicism. This never works.

Thing is, Mercedes has become extremely good at figuring out what works with the C-Class. More than 10.5 million have been shifted since 1982 in