In 1984, during my Honda-hawking days in Texas, our neighboring Mercedes-Benz dealership was all atwitter upon Daimler introducing the first “Baby Benz,” the 190E sedan. We knew our waiting-list-only Accord was a far superior automobile but that didn’t stop two of our salespeople from buying 190Es while the rest of us stuck with our Chevy trucks. The little Mercedes was a turd: terribly unreliable, cramped and slow. Much to our delight, the media said the 190E was not worth twice the price of an Accord.

Fast forward to 2016, your humble site’s readers and writers voted the latest entry-level Mercedes, the stylish front-wheel-drive CLA250, as one of the Ten Worst Automobiles Today. Like with the 190E, the CLA is flying off dealers’ lots, so what do we know?

Mercedes-Benz introduced the latest version of the C-Class two years ago and it’s now the brand’s best-selling model in America by a large margin — not to mention handily outselling its top competitor, the BMW 3 Series.

This is finally one small Benz that everyone loves and for good reason. The C300 is a miniature S-Class. Read More >

It’s a good ol’ fashioned case of he said/his electric carmaker said.

Yesterday, we all puzzled over the case of the California man who claimed his brand spankin’ new Tesla Model X went Maximum Overdrive and attempted to turn a store into a drive-thru.

In response to media scrutiny, Tesla Motors reviewed the vehicle’s electronic log (isn’t data collection great?), and now says the finger of blame points squarely at the driver, not at a vehicle malfunction. Read More >

Stop. Wait a second before you get in. Study the Mazda 6’s curves and tell me this isn’t the best-looking car in its class.

Alright, now hop in, depress the starter button, and listen to that sweet honey of a 2.5-liter inline-four purr. Ah, see, I tricked you into associating a gorgeous exterior (and interior) with other qualities you seek in a new car, and you up and let your imagination run away with itself.

Purr? In the 2016 Mazda 6, it’s more like a groan, a bellyaching protest, a teenager hiding under the covers after you remind him that science class begins in 17 minutes. Read More >

Okay, I admit: I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. It’s not really for me; Mrs. Baruth works in finance. (Without which, as you pimps and players out there should know, there’s no romance.) Rarely do I read the whole thing. This past Saturday afternoon, however, I broke the pull-cord of my son’s TopKart. Then he ran out of gas for his motorcycle. Which consigned us both to an early afternoon inside the house, because I was too lazy to address either situation.

Imagine my surprise to find an advertisement for an independent leasing agent in the last of the Saturday sections, back among the lifestyle articles and the usual Dan Neil attempt to sound like a more fey version of Oscar Wilde. Those members of the B&B who were born prior to the release of “Appetite For Destruction” will remember that stand-alone leasing shops were once very big business. They bought their cars from franchised dealers, often well after they’d obtained the customer’s signature on their own paperwork, and they relentlessly cross-shopped banks for rate and residual deals.

Often, these firms focused exclusively on members of the professional class; the big hitter in central Ohio during the ’80s was un-self-consciously titled “Physicians Leasing Co.” They were largely driven from the field by the beginning of this century by aggressive captive finance providers like BMW Financial. The tendency on the part of most banks to view the end-of-lease termination process as an additional and very lucrative profit center, a tendency that became more exaggerated as the prime rate fell and banking profits sank accordingly, didn’t help their business model one bit.

Nevertheless, here we are, in $THE_CURRENT_YEAR, with a manufacturer-agnostic leasing company advertising in the WSJ. So let’s see what the deals are, and what lessons we can learn from looking at them.

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Tesla Model X owners might want to double check their insurance coverage before hitting those rural highways in search of ecologically sensitive adventure.

Now that the electric SUV is rolling out of Fremont in bigger numbers, owners are starting to experience the normal headaches that come with vehicle ownership. One nagging issue owners are discovering is the cost of replacing the acres and acres of glass that make up the vehicle’s panoramic windshield. (Which happens to be the biggest in the industry.) Read More >

The difference between genius and stupidity, they say, is that there is a limit to genius. How else can you can explain the latest brake checking crash video making the rounds?

But if you’re willing to limit your stupidity just a tiny bit, you can avoid being the next fellow who finds out the hard way about those steel cables in the middle of the freeway.

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The 200 is certainly approaching death’s door more rapidly than first anticipated.

First, there was a temporary plant shutdown as a reaction to an inventory glut. Then, in response to the market’s clarification that, yes, the 200 has truly fallen out of favour, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles instituted layoffs at the Sterling Heights factory where the 200 is built. News that the current Chrysler 200 and Dodge Dart would not be followed up by FCA-developed successors was made all the more real when FCA boss Sergio Marchionne said 200 production may be suspended by the end of this year.

From a corporate standpoint, there’s no doubt that FCA’s compact and midsize U.S. market passenger cars are not long for this world. Marchionne even kicked the 200 while it was down by publicly declaring its faults, design errors which play a part in Consumer Reports’ anti-recommendation.

But dealers still have tens of thousands of Chrysler 200s to sell. Read More >

Over the last two or three decades, the American full-size pickup truck has morphed into something thoroughly and completely different. What was once utilitarian and practical is now imposing, luxurious.

Is it possible that the truest successor of the original F-Series is currently sold in Europe with a five-cylinder diesel engine?

I tested the new Ford Ranger to find out.

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Two weeks ago, I told you the story of my friend “Jenny” and her purchase event at Orlando Kia West. I’m happy to report that the dealer has resolved the issue to her satisfaction.

She received a personal call from the general manager offering a set of floormats, and she’s seeking to refinance the vehicle through her stepfather’s credit union. According to Jenny, the general manager was quite apologetic, but he also said that “90 percent of the numbers in that article were wrong.”

Mr. GM, you still have my e-mail (it’s barkm302@gmail.com, if you lost it), and I’m happy to print a retraction on anything that I got wrong. (In the meantime, we’re still happy to show up on the first page of results when people search for your dealer on Google. –Ed.)

But, in the meantime, let’s talk about what Jenny could have done differently, and what you can do the next time that you’re looking to buy a car to avoid all the hassle and pain she experienced.

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Volkswagen, as it slides further into sales bedlam, has decided the best thing to boost its profile in America is a pink Beetle with a hashtag for a name.

I wish I was making this up.

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It’s common for younger and more progressive members of the B&B to lambaste me as a sort of grunting throwback to a past that never truly existed, a Triceratops grazing contentedly through a field of single mothers, pernambuco-necked guitars, and filets mignon while the participation-trophy-shaped asteroid of genderless, sexless, non-meritocratic, feelings-centric, pansy-assed Millennial culture streaks overhead to announce my impending doom. Maybe they’re right — but it doesn’t feel that way to me. The truth is that for most of my life I never really sympathized much with traditional Western culture or “caveman fragile masculinity” or any of that stuff.

When I was a young man, I saw myself as a progressive, non-traditional thinker. If there was a machine out there, so to speak, I wanted to rage against it. Obviously, I’m not exactly Charleston Heston, you know? I listen to disco music and order lime green cars and refer to Robert Bly every chance I get. Yet, here I am, taking a last stand against the overwhelming hordes of adult-kickball players and streaming-video addicts. If nobody else is going to stand up for the culture that lifted us from the caves of Altamira to the Manhattan Project, then I’m going to do it. You could argue that I’m in the position of the last Byzantine emperors: making a last-ditch stand to preserve a system to which I was not born.

With all of this in mind, I’d like to sit down with all of you and take a serious, considered look at the video below the jump. I’d like to argue that it represents several important trends in modern culture — trends of which many TTAC readers approve in theory but might be surprised to see taken to their logical extremes.

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Someday, in that distant future, when I finally get around to publishing my book, there is a strong chance I’m going to open it with a list of all the ways in which I have abused my 1995 Porsche 911 Carrera. Not in the modern douchebag-showoff sense of driving a Huracan in the snow or driving an Aventador in the snow or driving any other Lamborghini in the snow for a YouTube video only to have the thing fastidiously concours-detailed the minute the GoPros stop rolling. More like in the sense of just using it as a regular car for 60,000 or so miles. Driving it in the rain, the hail, the 100-degree Midwestern summer heat. Leaving it outside random girls’ houses in every kind of neighborhood imaginable, overnight. Using it to carry tires and oil drain pans and children. I’ve watched my son ride his bicycle directly into the thing and shrugged it off. I’ve dropped the clutch at 5,000 rpm, hundreds of times.

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Bad PR from customers annoyed by their problem-plagued Tesla Model X SUVs continues to hammer the electric automaker.

A lawsuit filed against Tesla by a California man is the latest bit of bad news (and press) for the company. According to Barrett Lyon, the bizarre electrical gremlins running loose in his Model X turned his vehicle into a static driveway decoration. Read More >

They say that any accident that results in zero injuries is a good one, but Detroit-area residents trying to beat Memorial Day Weekend traffic on Friday probably didn’t feel that relief.

Huge backups were reported west of the city after Interstate 96 was shut down for a heartbreaking reason. It was enough to make normally stoic fire officials pause as they considered what had been lost. Read More >

The best thing about writing the Ask Bark series since the beginning of the year has been the feedback that you, the Best and Brightest, have given to our questioners. I might have a few good answers, but I’m only one man, and there are literally thousands of people who read each Ask Bark column. Collectively, you have wonderful ideas.

However, individually, you have some real clunkers. Today, we’re going to talk about the often given advice I’ve seen in the comments. Some of it isn’t just wrong, it’s flat-out harmful.

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