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2007 Isuzu i-series
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2002 Benz
C-Class Coupe by TCC Team
(3/10/2001)
Benz: What's
In A Brand? by TCC Team
(3/12/2001)
You review the '02 C-Class
Coupe
Being an exclusive luxury brand can be a double-edged sword. To maintain the country-club cachet that luxury buyers expect and demand, the car in question has to be expensive enough so that not everyone can get one -- or has one. Otherwise the prestige disappears and you might as well be driving a Taurus or Accord.
On the other hand, to remain profitable in the automobile business, you have to have decent sales volume, which runs directly counter to the first objective. An "affordable exclusive" is rarely either.
Still, Mercedes is banking on its new four-seater C-Class hatchback coupe to manage the trick of widening the Mercedes-Benz brand appeal without cheapening the currency of the three-pointed star. They may pull it off.
The $24,950 (to start) C230, based on the current C-Class sedan, is insistently described by the Mercedes people as, ahem, a "sports coupe" -- though it's very clearly a three-door hatchback, not a true coupe, like the more expensive CLK320, or the BMW 3-Series coupes it competes against. The reason for the wordplay undoubtedly has its source in the economy-sounding echoes of the term, "hatchback" -- which is uncomfortably synonymous in a lot of minds with borderline bottom-feeder models in the sub-$20,000 range.
Verbal realignment
Semantics aside, the hatchback configuration is actually rather handy -- in many ways, it's even preferable to a conventional trunk, especially when you're dealing with a smallish two-door car that has limited interior room to begin with. The hatchback set up lets you cart unwieldy stuff home from the store that you might not otherwise have a prayer of handling -- at least with a conventional coupe and attendantly ridiculous trunk -- often not much more than a second glove box on cars of this type.
