Short drive with the C220 and the E200K So my wife and I decided to take a one day trip on Sunday, and what better place to go in the monsoons than the lonavla house.
After confirmation calls, there were 7 of us on for the trip. We chose to take the Mercs, and since the only other male was my inexperienced kid brother, we decided to take my driver along. More than the weather in Lonavla, I was looking forward to a headon comparo between the C and the E. Cann the girlie conversations, all I wanted to do was shift from the drivers seat of one car to the other along the way.
The meeting point was down my house early morning, and I started with the E200K. I found the E200 to be pretty responsive at first, and wondered what all the fuss about it being underpowered was! Buttttttttttttt after the first 50 kilometers, the E200 left me unimpressed. In terms of power, there is nothing "up" there. This engine is severely stressed to cope with the massive weight of the E Class, and is an outright shame to the rest of this supposed drivers car. The 1.8 liter runs out of breath even before you get to what even my aunts would call "spirited driving". Out on the expressway, the E seems to hit an invisible wall at 180 km/h with very little progress to go any further. My driver was leaving me for dead on the open and up the Lonavla ghats, try as I much....I could not keep up with the C220. Mercedes slushboxes are known to be the best in the world and the E transmission lives up to the reputation of being extremely smooth and jerk-free. Passengers can barely tell when the transmission is going through its ratios. Drive sedately and it will impress, but try to "kick-down" when you want to overtake and it will disappoint. The response time was very slow.
Another surprising aspect of the E200K was the relatively small size of its interiors. Team-BHPian "Sahil" recently commented on how similar he found the E interiors to that of the C. Rightly so...its really not that much bigger. Its only on the rear seat where you can tell the difference. From the drivers seat, I found the instrument cluster to be pretty complicated with three dials (speedo, rpm, clock) and an array of text and bar graphs. Gimme the C Class' two dial cluster anyday!
The one area where the E200 was very impressive is the ride quality. Bad roads were eaten up with a silent gulp, unlike the C220 which does tell its passengers of how incapable our road maintenance department is. I would attribute some of the difference to the C220s high performance Eagle F1s.
Unsurprisingly. I switched over to the C220 soon enough. With its 6 speed transmission and the stonker of a CDI engine...its a no-brainer.
GTO |