Mercedes A class 2019 ish

My wife has changed jobs and gets the train to work 3 days a week , WFH the other two days so the Pug 5008 isn’t doing the  miles it used to plus we don’t need such a big car anymore.

So she seems quite keen on an A class  so may be going  to look at one at the weekend.

just wondering if  had experience of the recent version. Looking at a petrol , premium spec and I’m favouring the 220 petrol with it being a 2.0 instead of the 180/200 with the 1.3 engine.

I’ve been in a 180 spec one with the 1.3 engine, it certainly didn’t feel as if it was lacking power for normal driving.  It belongs to a mate, he likes it.
consider also the bmw 2 series active tourer, similar but very slightly higher.

I’ve driven them, and while I didn’t drive them any great distance, two things did make me somewhat disillusioned with them. First, I found the seats very hard and uncomfortable. I had to take one to Autoglass in Bristol, about an hour’s drive from work for a screen replacement and recalibration, and by the time I’d got to Bath, I wanted to dump the car at the station and catch a train back! I was just ridiculously uncomfortable because the seat was so hard, which I must admit was really unusual for a Merc.
Second, the electrics can be problematic – we’d had one in the workshop for bodywork repair and refurbishment, it had been through QC and was literally on its way out of the shop to short-term storage, and the entire dash display system, which has everything you need on it, just went black, absolutely no information showing. Imagine driving on a motorway at night, and everything vanishing, no speed, satnav, all crucial information gone.

We had a couple where the battery died after the car was dropped off by a logistics driver, and the cars were effectively bricked; nothing we did could get them to start, there were lots of error codes, but one of our blokes skilled in auto electronics spent hours with a laptop and in the end the cars were trailered to Mercedes main dealers to deal with.

Now, these are issues with a small number of cars, out of god knows how many in existence, and how many have had similar issues it’s not possible to say, and previous, older Merc A-Series all seemed to be fine, certainly the seats at least were comfy! I wouldn’t have one, unless I was leasing it, just in case.

What’s the expression about bad apples?

I had a … 2014 one or thereabouts. The boot is TINY. The short windows made it like driving a tank. The rear leg room is enough to make pre-teens complain there isn’t enough space. It typically had Renault engines. MB servicing was, well, MB servicing.

It looks like a Corsa but with higher costs.

But it is a MB.

edit – rear view is like a skinny letterbox.

imo there are better cars to have

edit edit it was recalled for some boot leak due to design. This meant the boot became damp and the water ended up in the footwells. No doubt this will have been fixed for newer ones. probably.

FYI there are 2 variants of the 1.3 engine

The A180 has 130-ish BHP

The A200 has 160-ish BHP

I was looking at these also and would probably go for the A200 AMG Line.

I know a couple of people with them. They both like them because they are a merc and they feel posh. All sorts of lights inside and it looks the part.

One has had the paint peal off it from new and the others boot leaked (had many thousands spent, new screens allsorts and still leaked) as well as a new cylinder head. MB were useless in both cases

I’d stick with the Pug5008 – it’s badged as a French car so you have no pretensions with it. The A class is effectively french but whoring itself as premium German.

Both are going to shit the bed with dodgy french electrics at some point.

I’ve just driven mine from Scotland to the Alps with no issues of comfort. Wife and kids happily slept a good chunk of the journey and that’s with firmer seats and suspension than the A200. Great daily driver and all rounder.

Get it serviced well away from MB dealers though, any decent Indy will manage fine.

Couldn’t you save yourself about five grand and just by a Megan instead, then do as Mercedes do and spend 50p on a three pointed start to glue on the front?

I really don’t get them. MB had a blisteringly clever engineering team that came up the original A-class, refined it well for the mk2 and then just binned it off with a badge-engineered unoriginal Renault clone. Made them a fortune.