Garrett McNamara Builds Surfboard with Mercedes-Benz

In vehicles, we’re familiar with certain values from Mercedes-Benz: comfort, performance, technology, safety and innovation, all that. While impressive, there is another element that we forget because we’re grown used to having excellent cars around us year-after-year. We’re referring to the wonder of what an automobile actually is: a gasoline-combusting machine that would have seemed straight out of science-fiction when it was first invented except that science fiction itself had barely been invented.

We want to get back to that original wonder, that marvel movement and speed that now gets buried underneath all the satnav and hand-stitched leather and refined drive-trains. To help us appreciate the marvel that driving can be, Mercedes-Benz collaborated on a vessel that captures motion and nature in a way that many of our vehicles try their hardest to emulate: a surfboard.

Garrett McNamara is a world-class Hawaiian surfer who holds the record for largest wave ever surfed—it happened at Nazaré, Portugal—survived the 2012 Jaws surf break in Hawaii’s Pāʻia, and has surfed actual tidal waves—tidal waves—from shattering glaciers in the arctic circle. Mercedes-Benz invited McNamara to the design center in Sindelfinge to glean what lessons they could from one of the world’s foremost authorities in ocean surfing.

To survive the monstrous hellions that he eludes in his profession, McNamara needed a board that was faster than any ever built. From Garrett, Mercedes-Benz’s engineers learned the principles of surfing: where the maximum dynamic point lies, where the board needs to be thin, where it needs to be rigid and where it needs to have some give. The engineers were then able to use their knowledge of materials and digital design to produce what heretofore had only existed in Garret’s mind.

Want to see how it turned out? Check out the video. You might find yourself wishing for summer a little more by the time you’re finished.

First Driving Impressions of the GLA-Class

When we last wrote about the GLA, it had just entered production in Germany, and we were looking forward to a spring arrival in the U.S. We now know, however, that the 250 4MATIC and 45 AMG will arrive in the fall, and the 250 in the spring of 2015.

To herald their coming however, we have our first drive impressions thanks to a write-up by Motor Trend. The GLA class is essentially meant to be the most entry-level of entry-level SUVs for Mercedes-Benz. Priced in the low 30s, it will either include or make available many of the upscale features that the brand carries, which should make you curious about exactly one thing: how does the low-cost, high-value GLA fit into Mercedes-Benz’s business model?

The answer isn’t terribly important because consumers are still going to get an exceptional product for an unreasonably reasonable price. As Motor Trends notes, the GLA is a small vehicle. It’s about four and a half inches shorter than the Range Rover Evoque, and almost two inches shorter than the MINI Cooper Countryman—MINIs, after all, are known for one thing.

The 250 version gets a turbocharged four-cylinder, and the AMG is an AMG. Motor Trend thinks that the AMG’s exhaust note is perhaps the liveliest across the entire AMG lineup, which shows that it’s not how big the car is around the engine, but the engine itself that counts.

The magazine’s writers took the GLA around Malaga, Spain to test out its roadworthiness and were able to detect the 4MATIC’s favoritism toward the front wheels, and extra boost to the rear wheels when tough cornering demands more traction.

All in all, the next 12 months or so are going to see lots of change in the crossover SUV space, and Mercedes-Benz clearly wants to enter the fight with the best possible machine instead of rushing to market. A fall arrival will also give additional time to study new challengers like the Porsche Macan to see if M-B can’t give the GLA an extra thing or two to push it over the top when it arrives. A wise strategy to be sure, and one that makes us look to the GLA’s arrival with anticipation.