The face-lifted interior for the C-Class is lovely and the infotainment upgrades have removed all the annoyances I had with the pre-facelift. My C43 was pre-facelift but my C63 is facelift, and while the two are similar enough with the car off, when everything is on, the differences make a big difference to the look and feel of the cabin. The all-digital dash is lovely, the bigger/higher res screen makes a bigger difference than you'd expect. One thing I missed with my old F10 was being able to have two things on screen, such as nav and media, well you can in the facelift. The UI in general feels a lot more modern and responsive. Apple Car Play is nice but I barely use it unless I want to use Waze.
The ambient lighting improvements compared to the pre-facelift were very much needed, really adds some atmosphere to the cabin when it gets dark
I've had experience of 3 C Class - my Sister had a 2017 pre facelift C220 and I've previously put about 1500ish miles a peice on a 2018 C300 pre facelift and most recently a late 2019 C220 AMG Line - so a facelift.
The exterior styling is wonderful. I do not think there is a better looking car in this class - infact I don't think there has ever been a better looking car in this class. It looks sophisticated and prestigious in a way that no 3 Series or A4 ever has. Especially the AMG Line (and thus, definitely, the C43). Interior wise it's also pretty good - yes there are cheap plastics but it feels like somebody has tried to make a mini E Class out of it and they've pretty much succeeded. It's night and day better than the F30 3 Series, the car it was designed to compete with.
Where it fell down for me was the infotainment system - which as you'll know is something I place a disproportionate weight on in a car. The pre facelift with the Garmin map-pilot is just so shocking its unbelievable but we're not talking about those so we'll focus on the facelift with the better screen and the fully digital dash. So, yes, it has a fully digital dash. But it doesn't really do anything useful that the analog dash does. So other than looking nice it isn't much of an improvement over the facelift. Onto the nav - one of the worst I've used. Both in terms of usability and routing algorithm. And the additional functionality just felt like a disjointed mess. Speed limit display for example - sometimes randomly displayed in the centre of the screen way out of my field of view. Sometimes never displayed at all. Great.
Even little things - it has bluetooth audio through which I used Spotify. Great! But every time I got out of the car and back in again it wouldn't resume. We were on a trip with lots of stop/start/getting out/scenery to look at so eventually just gave up using it because it was a nuisance to have to remember to do. It's this sort of lack of attention to detail that eventually wore me down. I'd say its hands down the worst system out of any of the competition - the Audi system isn't bad, BMW iDrive is (or was, stay tuned) the best in the business.
So after a week with my C220 AMG Line and lots of lovely pictures I handed it back with mixed feelings - in some ways the best car of its type i've ever driven. In other ways, the worst. Then my flight got cancelled and I had to rent whatever class was around and ended up going smaller than usual...
... an A200 AMG Line. Now this was bound to start badly - I'm not famed for my love of small hatchbacks. Nor black wheels. Or white paint. And here was a small hatchback with all of those things. No thanks.
Just.. wow. Any idea that my hatred of the C Class system was me being a BMW fanboy was absolutely blown out of the water. Incredible - this car has the new MBUX system and its straight to the top of the class. A glorious digital dash thats fully customisable and displays virtually anything you could ask for right up to full colour navigation map. A nice centre screen. Perfectly displayed speed limit info and loads of extra features like Augmented Reality Satnav. Routing algorithm was night and day different and Spotify even resumes when you get back in the car. So, it's not my BMW bias, the C Class system really is, unfortunately, quite poor. But the happy news is that every new Mercedes from now on will have MBUX and it is absolutely brilliant.
It's the best out of BMW, Audi and Mercedes at the moment - BMW Live Cockpit Professional isn't bad but the screen STILL isn't as configurable as Mercedes MBUX (or Audi Virtual Cockpit from 5 years ago) and the weird shape dials are just unnecessarily annoying. iDrive itself is absolutely excellent as ever - perhaps better to use than MBUX - but the pairing of the digital cluster and MBUX main screen means IMHO it pips idrive to the post.
The bottom line is that for me if I'm going to buy a virtually new car, I want the latest position on things like infotainment. And you won't get that in the C43 unfortunately. If I was buying something 4-5 years old then it would be far more acceptable - my F10 for example doesn't have a fully digital cluster at all let alone one that I can display a nav map on - but once you're looking at 12 months or even new cars unless you don't want everything to be up to date you'd not be going new?
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I’ve had several A class loan cars
