Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Mercedes-Benz C350e: pushing the accelerator that pushes back”.
It’S Chris with the verge in front of the beautiful Bay Bridge here in San Francisco, and we are here for a mercedes-benz event. Now the main event is the fon 5 luxury in motion, the self-driving car we saw at CES, but we are also driving the C 350 e that has a plug-in hybrid drivetrain and can run up to 20 miles on electrical loan. We had a chance to drive the C 350 e down the coast aways, and there are a few interesting features about this car. The most interesting is the accelerator. It has haptic feedback, which means that, as you put your foot on it, it applies resistance against your foot so that you know when you’re about to engage the gas engine. So if you don’t want to engage the gas, you can avoid it just by not overpowering that resistance and then also when you’re coming up on a car in front of you, it sort of pulses the accelerator very quickly twice. It feels like someone’s tapping on your foot, and that indicates that it’s time to take your foot off the accelerator, now you’re not going to buy this car over a Tesla Model S, but then again it’s not designed to compete with the Model S.
It’S a very different card, a very different price point: it’s smaller. The performance envelope is different. Really it’s designed to compete with a BMW 3-series, which the c-class is always designed to compete with. Bmw has hybrid versions of that now and now Mercedes has a version of the c-class to match it’s going to be coming out in the US later this year, and now I’m go get driven around in a self-driving f015 .
