Eighteen hours of travel and five hours of jet lag may have contributed, but it took time to find this car in the airport parking lot, small as it is (the parking lot). I knew to look for a compact four-door Merc, and this didn’t fit my mental image. The C-Class has grown up—it’s an S-Class that shrank in the dryer.

For 2022, Mercedes-Benz evidently recast its C-cars to appeal to younger buyers and drivers. It’s got screens (I like instruments with dials) and sliders (I like knobs) and touch-sensitive pads (I like switches that move) and voice commands (talking to my car feels silly—although I now talk to my TV at home, so there’s hope). I still don’t know how to switch off the radio, so I just slide the volume down to zero. Honestly, do they expect me to read the manual?

This new C-car also bristles with sensors that look in all directions and take over when potential threats appear. I was taught to do this for myself, and I like to think it has made me a better driver. Or at least a less lazy, more attentive one. Still, I can believe that someday one of these features may save my aging butt. And I do appreciate the 360-degree visual sweep around the car that’s available at the touch of a pad before starting off.

To a Gen Y or Z driver, the heart of this car is probably the MBUX, Mercedes-Benz User Experience, computer. To me, the engine is still the heart of a car, and M-B does engines exceedingly well. This one is a 2-liter 4-cylinder gas-burner with not only forced induction—a twin-scroll turbocharger—but also an ISG, a 48-volt Integrated Starter-Generator in the transmission housing that makes this a mild hybrid. The C300 has 255 horsepower and 295 pound-feet of torque on tap, with momentary bursts of an extra 20 horses and 148 torques from the ISG.

The car won’t drive on amperage alone, but the extra boost provides instant, strong response to the throttle pedal; smooths out turbocharger lag, if any, as well as the idle stop-start feature; and helps achieve about 35 MPG on the highway. Impressive, all of it. So is the seemingly stepless 9G-Tronic automatic transmission with, yes, nine forward speeds and shift paddles on the steering wheel. In M-B-speak, 4Matic means all-wheel-drive, a $2,000 option.

Eco, Comfort, Sport and Individual drive modes are available. On re-start, the system defaults to Comfort; reselecting Sport requires poking another vague touch control. In all modes, handling and response are flawless except for the brakes, which are overly sensitive.  

The big, brilliant screens offer three modes of their own—Navigation, Assistance and Service—and three different looks: Sporty, Classic and Understated. Assistance mode focuses on real-time traffic conditions; the Navigation screen looks capable of guiding a supertanker through the Straits of Hormuz; and Understated shows just minimal information. All systems can receive over-the-air updates. Oh, and seven different color schemes are available too, which include the ambient lighting.

Not to be unappreciative, but a word about adjustability: We used to buy German cars because—thanks to the demands of the high-speed autobahn—their engineers knew how to set them up for active, involved driving. But for years now they’ve been passing the buck to us, saying, essentially, OK, you figure it out!

Of course, they’re just giving us flexibility and choices. But once the novelty wears off, I’d wager that 97% of drivers leave their car in one mode 97% of the time. Subtract all this adjustability and the price of the car, not to say maintenance over the long haul, might drop substantially. But here the Mercedes-Benz marketing team would raise a fuss because adjustability is a selling point, and the “other guys” (Audi, BMW, Porsche) are doing it, too. Live with it. Brag about it to your neighbors.

Everything in the new C-Class seems to have been thought out to the nth degree, if not overthought to the point of needless complexity. In truth, this is an impressive vehicle, but as a card-carrying Old Guy, I’m just not ready to like it yet (although the cabin, seats and dynamics are outstanding). And this isn’t even one of M-B’s new EQ electric cars, which are really Star Trek.