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Paragon Logistics have now added the new Mercedes R-Class to their fleet. Review by Andrew Frankel: The Sunday Times Every week I get on a plane, fly somewhere, drive a car, fly home, sit down and write this column. And while that car may be great, ghastly or any shade between the two, hardly ever is it genuinely ground-breaking.
We should not be surprised: the car has been with us for 120 years and you’d have thought every viable permutation would have been found by now. Well, we missed one and this, the Mercedes-Benz R-class, is it.
It won’t change the way millions drive in the way that the VW Beetle or the Golf GTI did because, priced between £42,000 and £55,000 when sales start in the spring, it is out of reach of too many.
Nevertheless, the R-class is an entirely new concept. Too stylish ever to be thought of as an MPV, too spacious and luxurious to fall within the confines of what anyone would recognise as an estate, yet sleek and low enough never to be confused with an off-roader, it takes ingredients from all these genres and blends them into a new class of car.
It is as beautifully styled as it is cleverly conceived. If the anti-SUV lobby grows, those who feel pressured into looking for another way of carting around their family will fall gratefully into its lap. It has the space and the seats (all six of them) but carries none of the stigma, even though it’s four-wheel drive.
There will be two versions when it arrives early next year: this long-wheelbase model and a shorter version for those who either don’t need or can’t afford the extra space. I won’t drive the shorter car for some months but I can tell you it looks less elegant than its longer brother and will be more cramped, too. For an extra £1,500 the long R-class will give six 6ft passengers a window seat each and space to spare. And if you fold the rear-most row flat and push the middle row as far back as it will go, four can be transported in extravagant, almost vulgar, comfort.
Access to the third row of seats is as dignified as you could expect without sliding doors, and if you fold all four rear seats forward the boot is a quarter as big again as the E-class estate, itself already one of the most capacious estates out there.
With no centre seat in the middle row, the view down the cabin and to the outside world is unimpeded and gives an airy interior feel that’s rare in any car. There will be no seven-seat version for, as one Mercedes man put it to me, “we already make a van”.
On the first models, power will come from a 3 litre diesel engine and two petrol motors, a 3.7 litre V6 and a 5 litre V8. Mercedes staff are coy about an AMG derivative but you can take it from me it’s a racing certainty. Expect a 6.3 litre V8 model developing more than 500bhp sometime before the end of next year.
Frustratingly, because the R-class is built and will first go on sale in America, the examples Mercedes floated across the pond were all in US specification. This meant no diesels and soggy suspension designed for the absence of curves on US highways.
Of the two petrol-powered cars I drove, the V8 is better by far. It’s quicker (0-62mph in 7sec, versus 8.4sec) and its rich, mellow note gives it character. The V6 sounds bland and needs frequent changes up and down the seven-speed gearbox to give respectable performance.
In the main, though, this is an astonishingly complete car. Even its construction quality, something that has suffered in recent years on nearly all Mercedes and US-built ones in particular, seems to be back where it belongs. Indeed, the only reason the R-class’s rating misses a fifth star is the question mark that will remain over its handling until I drive a European-specification car.
A shame, then, that Mercedes is seeking to associate the R-class with its new mid-sized MPV, the B-class. While the B is a “compact sports tourer”, the R is its big brother, a “grand sports tourer” if you will. In fact the B-class is an overpriced, underachieving mistake, the R-class an inspired piece of engineering.
The R-class is further evidence that car makers are branching out into untapped areas to secure sales at the high end of the market. BMW and Audi are hastily designing models to combat the R-class and Porsche last week confirmed plans to build a four-door coupé called the Panamera. Jaguar is rumoured to be planning a “crossover” estate cum off-roader.
But until they are all ready, Mercedes will have this newly discovered field to itself.
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