The Mercedes A220 Raises The Bar For 'inexpensive' Luxury Cars

The Mercedes A220 Raises The Bar For 'inexpensive' Luxury Cars

A tech-filled Benz no longer requires your entire life savings. Luxury vehicles are expensive. German luxury vehicles are very expensive. Sure, you get bottom-of-the-barrel trim on the cheapest fancy car, but typically that means you end up longing for the models that are the next level up. The Mercedes A-Class changes that. Mercedes infuses its new entry-level sedan with top-level tech. The MBUX user interface is a triumph that pushes infotainment systems to the next level. Even though on paper the engine seems underpowered, on the roar the A220 has just enough power to make driving fun. The small sedan is Mercedes' play for up-and-coming S-Class owners. Right now that person is just launching their career. Eventually, they want the big office, the big house, the invitation to the exclusive club where they can sneak cigars on the deck and of course, the large, luxurious German sedan. But while they climb the corporate ladder, they can still impress their bosses with the small Merc that has many of the same tech features you'd find in the CEO's car.

32,500) was announced as the first vehicle to get Mercedes' latest infotainment system, MBUX. With it, you can control almost anything in the dash with your voice, using natural language. You can tell the car you're too hot and it'll lower the temperature. Need to add a taco stop to your road trip and only want to visit restaurants with four or more stars on Yelp? Just say, "Hey Mercedes" and tell it to add an additional stop with those parameters using Nuance's Dragon Drive speech technology. What's impressive is that Mercedes is able to deliver on the promise of an in-car voice assistant even when the audio conditions aren't ideal. The system was able to understand me with the windows down, with the sunroof open and while playing music. I found it to be the in-car voice assistant that understood me best. Mercedes has three additional input methods. There's the typical touchscreen (housed in a bright 10.25-inch display), a trackpad in the center console and a tiny trackpad on the steering wheel.

Unless I was using CarPlay (which support for comes standard), I defaulted to the trackpads. The reason they work so well is that Mercedes created an Infotainment UI that uses three large features on the homepage. It's not exactly sparse, but its minimalism is easier to decipher than a screen filled with multiple icons. After spending a week with MBUX, it's clear that Mercedes has done an outstanding job creating an infotainment system that replaces the act of plugging your smartphone into your car and using CarPlay or Android Auto. I found talking to the car for navigation easier than using Google Maps for complex routes. Plus, the AR feature of the display showing a camera view of an upcoming turn complete with arrows and a name of the road floating above said route is a brilliant use of AR. That's right, Mercedes found a practical use for AR. The rest of the technology inside the A220 is nearly as remarkable. The driver's assistance system is on par with the rest of the market (if you don't factor in Tesla) with adaptive cruise control displaying smooth transitions during merges and cut-ins. It'll also read signs and slow down your set speed to match the legal speed limit. That's helpful if you're trying to limit your traffic violations, but you can turn it off if you're fine trusting your gut. Also, the Lane-keep assist kept the vehicle centered in all but the sharpest freeway corners. I found that the system particularly shines when you're stuck in gridlock. Nothing like traffic to remind you that most driving is a chore best suited to having a robot companion.

You鈥檙e right, I鈥檝e not won at Sepang before, but I鈥檝e had some good races here - and I鈥檇 like to put the record straight with a victory this weekend. 鈥淚 think we go into the weekend feeling pretty optimistic because Sepang is quite a high-speed circuit and our car has usually gone well in the high-speed stuff during winter testing. Sepang will also be a test because of the high temperatures, but we鈥檝e traditionally been able to manage the cooling on our car quite well, so I don鈥檛 think that will be too much of a concern. Will we get a clearer picture of overall pace this weekend? 鈥淐learly, we鈥檙e very encouraged by our pace, both in qualifying and in the race, and I鈥檇 like to think we can continue that at Malaysia this weekend. I think both Mercedes AMG and Red Bull Racing have performance up their sleeves, and they鈥檒l both be very fast in qualifying and the race.

As far as Vodafone McLaren Mercedes is concerned, it鈥檚 nice to be the hunted rather than the hunter, which has been the case in the past few seasons. 鈥淏ut I know how well our team can respond - the result in Australia will only double everyone鈥檚 resolve. The development race has already started and we鈥檒l be pushing like crazy to stay at the front. 鈥淓verybody within Vodafone McLaren Mercedes was tremendously buoyed by our performance in Melbourne last weekend. As we all know, a Formula 1 winter is incredibly tense as it鈥檚 almost impossible to know if the targets you鈥檝e set internally will set the standard or leave you wanting. 鈥淗appily, we were delighted to discover that MP4-27 has been successfully developed into a race-winning package - and that鈥檚 a source of huge pleasure, and huge relief, for the whole team. 鈥淪epang was one of the original 鈥榥ew world鈥?Formula 1 circuits and one that triggered the sport鈥檚 global expansion into Asia at the start of the millennium. I鈥檓 pleased that it remains a mainstay of the calendar, but also that it has developed a character and history of its own.