You may be wondering what we're doing testing a car that's been around for five years and will be leaving in two. The answer is that the winds of change sometimes travel faster than redesign cycles, and the current iteration of the Baby Benz seems to have lived most of its life in a virtual vortex.
Sure, it looks like the same C-class that's been filling aspiring yuppie garages since 2001, but it hasn't sat still since. By its second year, a hatchback had sprung to life with a raspy supercharged 4-cylinder we thought we'd seen the last of, followed by a station wagon, and finally a high-performance AMG variant called the C32, which retreated from its V8 upgrade back to a (supercharged) V6. Then all-wheel-drive versions came and the 4-cylinder got replaced by another. Finally, the start of 2005 saw the short-lived C32 morphing into a V8-powered C55, and by year's end all wagons and hatchbacks were AWOL. Then the 4-cylinder vanished.
Mercedes marches into 2006 with the C-class all organized and figured out. We're back to one body style, and all C-classes are now sent to this country with a minimum of six naturally aspirated cylinders. There are two new model names but three new engines (out of four), which are all related, all improved, and two of them now hook up to either transmission type - and those transmissions are new, too. Couple all this with last year's spiced up interior, and we have a car whose sense of continuity pretty much ends with those Mr. Peanut headlights.
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