Bundled up in style

Veteran motoring scribe Stuart Johnston blows his hair back in the latest Mercedes Benz cabriolet, the E500

Approaching the cameraman I knew I had to keep my right foot buried in the cut-pile carpeting of Merc’s latest style-mobile.

There’s nothing worse than watching a car insert on television where the driver backs out of the throttle just before driving past the camera.  “What a wuss,” would be the general consensus. And this was being shot for the TV show Ignition, yet, with a viewership of particularly picky petrolheads.

So, no problemo, the couch audience would get a great roar of V8 sound on this shot.

What I didn’t take into consideration is that we were traversing Bainskloof in the Cape, a sinew of tarmac that cuts through the Hottentot Holland mountains, where no road has the right to be: twists and turns and undulations and yawning drop-offs into the scenery we should have stopped to admire.

The other bit of prior knowledge that would have made life more comfortable over the next few seconds would have been how quickly the E500’s 5.5-litre mill builds speed. So as I rushed past the picture-man flat in second (or was it third?), I decided it was time to brake.

Yeesh . . . as the scenery came up to meet me, it was brake. BRAKE!

I made it through the hairpin, otherwise I’d be writing this from an orthopaedic ward or prison, depending on how well the cabriolet’s open-air curtain bags and pop-up roll bars did their job. Trashing a R900 000 car is not to be taken lightly, even in the noble name of television, but thanks to individual wheel braking that kept my impending skid in bounds, and a superbly rigid chassis that let the wheels drop naturally into the standard-issue Bainskloof road undulations to find maximum grip, I’m actually looking forward to a more leisurely second date with the E Class Cabrio in a week or so.

This time I plan to concentrate more on some of the features which too many motoring hacks think make up the essence of a motor car.

We’ll get to the features in a moment, and lordy, mama, you could fill a whole magazine supplement on all the vagaries of, say, Pre-Safe braking, which warns you of an impact 2.6 seconds before it happens, starts applying the brakes for you 1.6 seconds before, and with 0.6 seconds to go before you crash into the mountain, clamps on 100% braking effort – which I did all by myself anyway.

But for me, what makes the new E Class Cabriolet so special is that Mercedes-Benz has stopped trying to be like BMW or Audi, and done its own thing once again, which was the best thing anyway, for most drivers.

The Merc has composure first and foremost on its must-have list, which means a chassis that truly doesn’t flex, top down or up. And the top is fabric, because Merc stylists decreed they weren’t going to saddle this ultimate style car with a massive rump to accommodate the complexities of a steel roof.

The top goes up and down in 20 seconds, so-so in today’s world of automated canopies, but when it’s up, it’s genuinely one of the quietest canvas roofs around.

When it’s down, you have an all-new device called an Air Cap. Merc probably spells that with capital letters, but you don’t say it that way. It’s a nifty little aerofoil that pops up in the windscreen cross beam and deflects air up and over your heads, and more importantly perhaps, the heads of passengers snuggled into the still somewhat cramped rear section of this supposed four-seater.

Preventing the air from tumbling back on you is the draught screen, a mesh device that has been on offer for about 10 years or so, and handy because your hair doesn’t get blown forwards when speeding along the boulevard sans top, thus preventing you from looking like a forward-thinking cone-head.

The third bit of niftiness is the Air Scarf, introduced about four years back on the SLK two-seater, allowing you to direct warm air to your neck through slots in the headrests.

This all means you can be bundled up in style for winter in Merc’s finest.

Ah, you may ask, but who wants to drive a cabriolet in winter? The answer should be, as the old Packard ads used to say, “Ask the man or woman who owns one.”

Winter is the finest season in which to drive a cabriolet because you really enjoy the crisp air swirling about within reach, but in the Merc at least, not intrusively so. In summer, my friends, you drive a cabriolet with the top up and the air-con on full-blast.

Because, cool as it may look, in summer, a top-down cabriolet is just too damned hot!