Quote:
Originally Posted by 530iDriver
Mercedes is not even the shadow of its former self.
Mass produced and nothing special is what they have become. How the once mighty have fallen!
Mercedes once manufactured and crafted the fines automobiles in the world. You could tell a MB from miles away. Best paint quality, best sheetmetal, best fit and finish, best interior materials, best attention to detail in and out, safety, innovation. It was a car that had unmistakable presence on the road. Beside a Rolls Royce, a Mercedes Benz was a car to aspire to.
Modern M-B is nothing like that anymore. Just another manufacturer. People go gaga over their interiors riddle with creaky to the touch plastic interior trim pieces and glued in iPad tablets.
The decline of Mercedes started in the early to mid 1990s. While probably better off today they still haven't been able to recapture their former glorious self.
I prefer MB cars made during the era of their best slogan ever:
"Engineered like no other car in the world".
This is a real Mercedes Benz!
These cars used to outlast/outlive pretty much anything on the road.
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This is off topic but, IMO, the "decline" of MB took steam around the time Daimler-Benz bought Chrysler in late 1990s and they decided to make cars compromised for cost to compete with everyone else. They really had no choice because by that time Toyota and Honda had equaled/surpassed them in quality/reliability while keeping costs down due to superior production methods (e.g., Kaizen).
The heyday of MB being "the best" was also the period when models lasted much longer. Today we deride Lexus for keeping the IS model into its 8th year, but back in the MB heydays, The SL500 for example, the R107 ran for about 19 years (1971-89) and the R129 ran twelve years (1989-2001). So they had time to perfect it, but today you can't have 10-20 year model cycles anymore as technologies become obsolete fast and people want/expect something new and have less patience to wait.
So, nostalgia is good, but those were different times, different challenges and standing pat was not an option.