Archived Road Test
Automobiles may indeed be sex symbols, as has been suggested in song, fable and the occasional serious treatise. Even so, sexiness is a quality almost impossible to detect in most of the Mercedes-Benz cars with which we are acquainted. Granted, the old gullwing coupe was pure, purple passion on wheels; granted, too, that the new C111 has an impressively visceral appeal that may well be sexy if a racing car/space capsule mix is what grabs you. But nowhere do we see an appeal to prurient interest in the mainstream of Mercedes-Benz automobiles.
So what is the appeal, one asks? We have already established that it isn't sex (unless you are very kicky) and no one who can read a specifications sheet is going to assume that the car will dazzle the peasants with straight-line performance. Nor will the Mercedes-Benz pull spectacularly big lateral Gs going around corners. It does have great brakes, and is astonishingly agile for being fully two tons of rolling hardware, but those virtues do not reveal themselves until after you have lived with the car for a time. The agility, particularly, isn't going to come across during the brief tour that constitutes a "demonstration" at most dealerships. Still, Mercedes-Benz sedans are sold, in numbers and at whopping prices, so the appeal is clearly there.
The answer to all this is not so much in the specifications sheet as it is in human nature. A lot of people buy cars based on what they think the car says about them. They buy a public statement of their position vis-a-vis the rest of the world. And owning a Mercedes-Benz says something like the following: "Here I am and you will observe that I obviously Have It Made, but I have too much taste and knowledge of fine things to be driving a common, vulgar Cadillac or a grossly ostentatious Rolls-Royce."
Very probably, that's the underlying reason for the first-time purchase of a Mercedes-Benz. The second time around, people are more likely to buy because experience has made them aware of the several virtues already mentioned—and perhaps a few of which we are not even aware, because we only lived with the new Mercedes-Benz 280SE coupe for a couple of weeks, and were still finding things to like about the car right up to the time the car was returned.
It was good that we were able to accumulate time in the 280SE. Our only previous exposure to the new car, with the all-new 3.5-liter V-8 engine, was very brief and under the highly artificial conditions of a test track. That was in Germany. Now, we have had a chance to drive the car at length under wildly varied conditions.
Our recent experience began with a trip to Reno, where Mercedes-Benz provided a flock of "three-point-fives" for the motoring press to flog. There was a 300SEL (with air suspension) and 280SEs in both coupe and convertible form—all having the new V-8. The 3.5 engine is an extra-dollars alternative to the 2.8-liter Six that is standard in all three models, and you can have the 300SEL with the big 6.3-liter engine. We think we favor the little V-8 option, as it is substantially identical in weight to the Six. With the big V-8, you get another 250 pounds of engine weight right over the front wheels, and unless you are an anvil salesman with a trunk full of samples to haul around, the car gets a tad out of balance.
But enough of that. Our purpose here is to talk about the 280SE coupe mit 3.5-liter engine, as that was the car in which we spent most of our time. Pleasant time it was, too, after a bit of initial strangeness wore off. The strangeness was in the handling, discovered in a flat-out rush up Interstate 80, which leads eastward out of Reno. Nevada has no speed limit on its open roads, so it is possible (if not always prudent) to just bury your foot in it and enjoy. Which we did. And during this exercise noted a curious shifty-on-its-feet feeling about the handling that was not expected and generated some misgivings about the car.
Those misgivings were soon dispelled, for it developed that everything steadied nicely once the
280SE was hauled over into a turn. It was the "radial" tires, of course, which have very limber sidewalk that were the cause—and it is little enough price to pay for radial benefits. These tires are very good in the wet, and give much reduced wear rates—particularly at sustained high speeds—as compared with conventional tires.
You'd have to say that sustained high speeds are just about the name of the game with the Mercedes-Benz. We went out Interstate 80 a solid 20 miles, and returned, and ran all the way flat-out (well, maybe lifting just a touch for the long, sweeping turns.) Zoom! Out, and then (zoom!) back. and the car never gave any indication that it was doing anything strenuous. There was no rise in water temperature; no drop in oil pressure.
That was a fairly convincing demonstration of high-speed capability, with the speedometer (which proved to be quite accurate) reading up around 125–127 mph on the level. Impressive, too, for the quietness at those speeds. The 280SE was, we thought, rather more noisy than one would expect in a $13,430 car at around-town trundling speeds—but the noise level didn't seem to increase to any great degree with speed.
In fact, what Mercedes-Benz could say of their 280SE 3.5 is that "at 100 mph, the loudest sound you hear is the air-conditioner." And they could say that even if the rest of the car was clattering away like a sack full of cowbells, because the air-conditioner is noisy. It does the job effectively and only somewhat obtrusively, as long as you don't need anything more than low-blower strength. If it gets really warm, and you get the blower up on the high end of the rheostat, the unit sounds like it's going to huff, and puff, and blow the windshield out.
After all the high speed stuff, and while still in Nevada, we took a side trip up to Virginia City—because that is a good place to visit and because the road up there is attractively swoopy and seldom obstructed by traffic. Right there, on that kind of road, is where you can learn to like the 280SE a lot. How can you fail to like it, when it keeps proving that it is your friend? Proves it by going where it is aimed, and agreeably changing direction when asked. You can lift off in the middle of a briskly-taken turn and the tail doesn't try to swing out, and the moderate understeer stays moderate. A dab at the brake is possible, too, without getting yourself into trouble, and trouble is what you get by the bag trying to brake in the middle of a turn with cars that lack the 280SE's fundamental balance.
Later in that day, we had a chance at maximum effort. The Mercedes-Benz people had located a skidpad out near Stead AFB, marked off a slalom course and we press types had ourselves a race. Good fun it was, too, especially after they turned on the sprinklers and wet-down the course and gave us a bit of practice going from full-lock slides to the left into full-lock slides to the right. The steering is slow for that kind of work, but it says something for the car that there were only a couple of spins in an entire afternoon of running under the careful eye of Rudolf Uhlenhaut.
