F rom the minute you step inside the car, from everything you look at, from everything you touch, from everything you feel and from everything you experience, you get a very specific sense of direction, of where all this is meant to take you - to a plane where there is the car, the road - and there is you! The seats are different, offer much more support, especially laterally, go much further down and have wide range of adjustability albeit manually. The three-spoke multifunctional steering wheel, the wing shaped top-section of the dashboard and the three domes on top of each of the large rev counter, speedo and the fuel gauge all lend a very sporty feel. The lower section of the dashboard and the centre console have a finely-patterned aluminium finish.

The interior is spacious with the front seats folding adequately to give access to the rear seat. The seatbelts are a problem though - for the front seat passengers to get hold of and for fear of strangulating the rear seat passengers. The boot too is large, especially with the foldable limphome spare wheel. Although Merc engineers have developed a new technology for the boot lid's catch and lock to prevent any sideward motion when on the road, we had enormous problems shutting it - with the warning lighting up on the instrument cluster time and again .

Even though the seats have to be adjusted manually, equipment levels are top notch, ranging from safety aids like ABS, ESP, airbags etc to convenience aids like keyless entry, automatic switching on of headlights in the dark or the wipers in the wet, and the onboard computer which offers a hot of data like the temperature, speed, fuel consumption etc.

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