Rental Car Reviews: Mercedes-Benz GLC 220d - The £40,000 That Hurt My Mind.

So, this looks like a new thing I’m going to be trying out. Whenever I get given a rental or courtesey car, I’m going to review it, and try to be as unbiased as possible (I said TRY!).
So, here’s what I currently have, a Mercedes-Benz GLC 220d Coupe 4Matic… What a mouthful!

Let’s get the pros out of the way first, because there’s only about 3 of them from what I’ve found in my 48 hours of living with this miserable excuse of a ‘£40,000 luxury car’.

From a distance, the car actually looks quite nice; the shape and angles of the car suit the Mercedes-Benz brand. It manages to looks sleek and elegant, whilst also being chunky and aggressive. Up close though, I’m not too sure about a couple of things; such as all that fake chrome, for example, or the rather cheap looking plastic trim around the wheel arches, which remind me of my base model 2005 Vauxhall Corsa, which had the exact same thing. This car also falls foul of the fake exhaust that many-a-modern car seems to have these days.

Engine-wise the car is smooth, with good pulling power through the rev-range, but it does sound a little unrefined and ‘tractor-ish’, but then again, it is a little 2 litre, so I suppose it’s quite impressive that it manages to haul a car of this considerable weight as well as it does. The gearbox is also a masterpiece, it really is smooth as silk, and sat at 70mph on the motorway, in 9th (Yes, it has NINE gears!), it’s barely ticking over 1400 RPM.

Unfortunately, that’s where the ‘good’ ends, and the bad begins. The interior feels very cramped and clostrophobic. I don’t know if it’s because EVERYTHING in this cars interior is black or not, but it’s just not a pleasant place to sit.

The centre console looks cheap too, as it’s just one hunk of piano black plastic, that creaks and makes all sorts of cracking sounds as the car changes temperature. Now, don’t get me wrong here, piano black looks classy, when it’s used reservedly, and not used to cover almost every available surface.
The vents look very out of place in the centre of the dash too, and none of the buttons seem to match. Some are one shape, some are another, some have trim round them, some don’t. It looks like they’ve just dived into the parts bin. Let me just remind you, this car, without any options, costs £40,000!

Moving slightly above the dashboard, we find what looks like a Kindle glued to the dashboard - yes, that’s right folks, it’s not been made to look like it’s part of the design, but more of an afterthought where someone suddenly realised they’d forgotten to put one in. It’s controlled, if we can use that word - and I’ll get to why in a moment - by the single worst infotainment controller I’ve ever seen. It takes up the entire space between driver and passenger. It’s clunky, when you select something the system often doesn’t register it, or it’ll start scrolling all on its own. It’s utterly hopeless. Again, let me remind you this car costs £40,000!
There’s also no numbered buttons for the radio, or to assign certain controls to, so if you want to immediately change radio station, you have to scroll through every station, which has to load up first and start playing before you can move onto the next one in the list, then for the system to sometimes decide that it doesn’t want you to listen to that station, and takes you back again.

Finally, we move onto my biggest bug-bear. The way you have to re-learn how to drive a car, just to go anywhere in this car. The gear selector in the automatic are on the right, where the windscreen wiper stalk normally is. So there’s been times in traffic where it’s started to rain, and I’ve flicked the ‘wipers’ only to suddenly be in reverse… Brilliant!
So the wipers are now on the left, with the indicators, so that’s a massive ball-ache trying to figure out how to make the wipers wipe once, which on most cars, is just a single flick upwards on the stalk, but of course that would be putting on the blinker/indicator in the Merc.

Overall, this car is just a mess. Yes, I suppose it’s not bad to look at, but once you’re in it, driving it, and trying to figure out how to use the wipers, whilst trying not to select reverse, whilst trying to figure out why when the sat-nav states it’s muted, it still talks to you, you realise just what a badly designed car this is.

Overall, I’d avoid this car. Go and buy a BMW X4, it’s direct rival, for a more comfortable, more logical drive and around £2,500 cheaper.