Oh, the Ways You Can Cabriolet!

Drop the top and any trip in a Mercedes-Benz Roadster or Cabriolet becomes positively dreamy. We certainly have a few favorite top-down moments of our own, but what about you? Showing up to your best friend(aka Bridezilla)'s wedding with wind-blown hair? Tanning while commuting? Summertime stargazing? Maybe going on your first single solitary road trip? Share your story with us and have an amazing weekend!

The Pleasurable Business of the 2014 Sprinter Van

About two months ago we reviewed the 2014 Sprinter 2500 Passenger Van, which is not a vehicle that gets a lot of reviews. It’s a tall, long cargo van that focuses more on function and utility than form or comfort. It appears that Mercedes-Benz is moving forward with plans to bring the smaller, luxury-oriented V-Class van to the U.S., but until that happens the Sprinter will remain the only van under the Mercedes-Benz marquee in the States. To supplement our review, we’d like to draw attention to Road & Track’s recent review of the 2014 Sprinter.

Mercedes-Benz is all about luxury. Whether considering a roadster, coupe, sedan, wagon or SUV, this brand is all about providing an excellently-crafted experience with premium materials, controls, technology and design. Beneath all of that there happens to be precisely-engineered machinery and mechanics, but the utility aspect of a Mercedes-Benz is usually overshadowed by the carefully-sculpted surface. Watch any commercial by the automaker and you’ll get this sense: a soothing voice over, a remarkably composed vehicle, an actor wearing just the trace of a smile, and something to suggest rewarding yourself.

The Sprinter is not about luxury. It’s a vehicle for business, not pleasure, and though a very nice business vehicle—Mercedes-Benz gave it a glossy remake for 2014—it is something of an anomaly for the brand. Business owners need to get things done, and they need the following values from a vehicle: reliability, low cost and spaciousness. That’s it. The Sprinter van therefore reflects these values, but being a Mercedes-Benz, it also comes with things that don’t fall strictly within those categories.

There’s a technologically advanced LCD screen for navigation, communication, mobile connection and camera vision. There are safety systems that MB has poured years into developing: Lane-keeping assist, forward collisions alert, blind spot alerts and crosswind assist soon. There’s a highly-efficient and robust four-cylinder diesel that is exceptionally well-made and capitalizes on a seven-speed transmission. Drivetrains this well-made are not typically found in business-class vehicles, which is the point.

We highly recommend Road & Track’s review of the 2014 Sprinter, and that you come by Leith, Inc. to try one for yourself. As the review notes, they’re remarkably easy to drive and open many possibilities for drivers dissatisfied with the familiarity of coupes, sedans and SUVs.

These Cities Swapped Out Freeways for Gardens and It Worked Out Fantastically

Editor’s Note: We are going to acknowledge right off the bat that this post is based on Gizmodo’s fantastic piece, “6 Freeway Removals That Changed Their Cities Forever”

Once upon a time, the automobile was born. Wheat-chewing farmers and cigar-chomping industrialists regarded the new machine with wonder and avarice, respectively. Baseball-loving boys and gradually-liberated girls clambered over the new horseless wagons as the newest plaything. And city councilmen cracked open cases of cigarettes, pouring burnt coffee into environmentally-unsound paper cup after environmentally-unsound paper cup as they stayed late at the office, trying to figure out how their city was going to handle the inevitable coming of the gasoline traveler.

Many of these freeways—like I-440 around Raleigh—handled the new wave of traffic just fine, and have even had to be widened. But some freeways never received the traffic they were built to handle. Other freeways received too much traffic with nearby viable roads receiving very little. In either case, inefficiency was happening. When city freeways are overloaded, it can create smog, pollution, a decrease in health, increase of crime and even a raising of cities’ internal temperatures.

Instead of expanding over strained roadways, some cities have chosen a different route altogether: they've demolished them.

Despite arguments that this would only make matters worse, traffic flowed to other areas of town and created an explosion of nature, good health and a shift in the cities’ cultures. Streams, rivers, bicyclists, joggers, street vendors and pedestrians have all laid claim to these miles of new space. We've included a few photos here, but you should check out the examples in San Francisco, Seoul, Portland, Milwaukee, Madrid, Seattle, and plans for the same in Dallas, Texas and Rochester, New York.

What do you think about this concept? Are there areas in our city that you think could benefit from it? If nothing else, we hope this prompts new thinking about roadways and city development.

Here’s Seoul before…

And here it is after!

These Self-Smacking Wipers Knock Ice Off Your Windshield!

Great clouds almighty: is winter over yet? Snow, sleet, |freezing rain, hail—come on now! It’s been a season of much precipitation and through it Raleigh has received a hard lesson: we’re not quite as equipped for winter as we thought we were.

As we drove through neighborhoods frozen by winter weather, however, we did notice that many residents had one trick down pat: keeping windshield wipers off the front window overnight so that they wouldn’t be frozen to the glass. As commendable as that is, many of us know that ice can still form on the wipers themselves, not to mention the glass, and trying to break up a half-inch layer of ice in the morning cold is no picnic.

One company has come up with a rather innovative—and automatic—way to circumvent this seasonal annoyance. Motor City Wiper is a company based out of Rochester Hills, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. They’re so far north that they’re nearly into—gasp!—Canadian levels of latitude, and at that area of the U.S., they encounter serious amounts of snow and ice for not just days, but months.

MCW’s solution is a special, wiper-banging arm mechanism that installs right in place of your normal wiper arms, only looking a bit more muscular. Do you sometimes tap your toothbrush against the sink to knock the water off the bristles? Same principle. The wipers themselves are nothing special, just whatever you happen to know. The muscly arm, however, smacks them against the glass with enough force to dislodge any ice on the blades themselves or your windshield. Observer:

You’ll notice that it’s a very confident, assertive rapping that isn’t overly violent or overbearing. As you can see at the end, the smacking isn’t automatic, but rather, triggered by the driver instead pushing a small, custom installed red button. That way you never have to worry about rogue wipers smacking you around the parking lot—unless you’re being chased by someone with a sense of humor behind the wheel.

As of yet this system isn’t for sale to people. Its inventors are shopping it around the major automakers in hopes that it will be either invested in or implemented across a brand’s lineup. In either case, we wish them well as this is one more device intended to keep us in the car where we belong while technology does the outside work for us.

Electric B-Class Readies for June Arrival

Mercedes-Benz B-class

Ah, first looks. That first time you see a new model in its not-quite-finished prototype form and realize what a new and interesting thing it is.

With the Mercedes-Benz B-class, you’ll have no need to worry about tensions between the lower and upper echelons of the Mercedes-Benz lineup as this is the automaker’s sole electric vehicle unless you count the Smart Fortwo. Thankfully we won’t have to wait long to see it—the new Mercedes EV will arrive in dealerships this June.

So let’s get acquainted! A recent first look article by Autoweek praised the B-Class for the exceptionally well-constructed nature and quality of its interior materials and finishing. Even though Autoweek was only evaluating a prototype version, it was clear that the top brass in Stuttgart wanted the press to have the most impressive model possible.

The B-Class is specified as seating five adults with 17.1 cubic feet of storage space in the rear. Up front is the Tesla electric motor, no small coup since Tesla—founded by genius billionaire Elon Musk—has gone through 11 years of trial and error in producing electric vehicles. Mercedes-Benz has been a supplier to Tesla of internal parts, so it makes sense that Mercedes-Benz would have close ties with the California-based company.

Tesla’s experience pays off with a motor that produces 174 horsepower and 251 lb-ft of torque. Those numbers mean the B-class won’t rattle at high speeds, nor lack the power to be aggressive when necessary. The car has a 100 mph top speed and a 90 mile range before it needs recharging.

Ninety miles should be plenty for commuters in the triangle since only 25 miles separates Raleigh from Durham. There are dozens of electric charging stations all over the area including 14 in downtown Raleigh alone. With a three-hour charge time, you could easily recharge over night or even before lunch if you have a station near your workplace.

Stay tuned for updates as we draw nearer to its June launch.

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.