Mercedes A200

GOODBYE £ 28,700 OTR/£30,830 as tested/£232pcm WHY I T ’S HERE It’s Britain’s favourite Benz. Does it deserve top 10 seller status? DRI V ER Stephen Dobie

IN THE FIVE YEARS I’VE WORKED AT TOP GEAR, NO LONG-TERM TEST car has united office opinion quite like the A200. Although this fourth-gen A-Class launched to fairly warm praise on its overseas press launch, the reality of running it in AMG Line trim with a mid-range engine has proved disheartening – particularly when you consider it’s one of the biggest-selling versions of one of the UK’s best-selling cars.

A vociferous, bullet-pointed email of its faults would often land in my inbox when a colleague borrowed the car; one of the most articulate members of our road-testing team was reduced to calling it “a total donkey”. With the A200 now departed, it’s a pertinent time to summarise those faults, not least how impractical it pans out as a family hatch. But in truth it’s a more efficient use of your time to describe what it does well.

Its interior smacks your gob as you climb in and does a half-decent job of backing up its wow factor. Our mostly millennial team are suckers for big screens, and, after a few long trips, you’ll have worked out how best you like them laid out (they’re massively customisable, dizzyingly so at first). So long as you don’t have too much of a regional twang, the voice recognition actually works too.

Its shrunken 1.3-litre petrol engine is pretty game, with more than enough performance for a car of this size and quite a rorty sound if you’re using it vigorously. The optional 7spd auto isn’t its perfect partner, though; much of the time it operates smoothly and gives you the impression it’s pretty smart, but every now and then it’ll drop a needless downchange that leaves you screaming through town in second gear. To avoid it, you end up using the throttle as tentatively as when you’re trying not to awaken the engine in a plug-in hybrid.

The problem is entirely remedied by the standard 6spd manual, something we tried in the 27bhp and £7k-lighter A180 SE that was booked in for comparison (the left-hand red car, pictured above), which proved wholly more likeable. Downgrading from AMG Line brings a comfier ride and a car that feels more at ease in general.

Mind you, it also exposes the conundrum of speccing a car with your own money. The job Merc has done at differentiating pauper and posh spec is exceedingly clever; the SE not only gets balloon tyres and less assertive bumpers, but different tail-lights that change the look of the rear completely. I’m no tart, but seeing the two side by side, I’d find it shamefully tough not to pay a bit extra each month regardless of the crashy ride it was about to unleash upon me.

So if the cheapest A-Class is a nicer thing than our A200, how about the priciest? Until the bombastic A45 arrives, the MercedesAMG A35 represents the most money you can spend on an A-Class, starting at £35k but swelling towards 50 grand with ease. Driving our A200 briskly, as it clumsily spun its wheels while the gearbox worked out what’s what, you never wished for more power. The AMG’s adoption of four-wheel drive ensures the 302bhp of its larger 2.0-litre turbo engine is handled admirably, however.

In fact, its speed is nothing short of shocking and makes you wonder quite what a potential licence-shredder that A45 will be. But

the A35 is so much more than a faster A-Class. Sharpening up the suspension, gearbox and steering not only makes it a more fun, incisive car when you drive it hard, but a more alert, less haphazard one the rest of the time. It’s a much more convincing £40k-plus car than the A200 is a £30k one. Even if its refinement is still poorer than you’d hope and the same ergonomic gripes are evident inside.

“Why is the gear shifter, arguably one of the more important controls, on a horrid little plastic stalk that looks borrowed from a Nineties SsangYong?” growled one of my workmates post-A200, summing up the disparity in quality between the A-Class’s showroom-stopping screen acreage and the controls you regularly touch with your hands. But while the A200 wore down quite a lot of office patience, it shouldn’t be taken as evidence the A-Class is a complete clanger. Or that swathes of the buying public haven’t a clue what they’re doing. If you won’t be swung away from Merc’s configurator by the (rightly) default Golf, then spend big or small, but don’t opt for an A200 AMG Line, the Jack-of-no-trades in the middle.