Remember these? Yeah, I tried not to either. Way back in the year 2001, Mercedes-Benz had their “cut off half their hair and dye it purple” moment when they came out with a really odd C-Class coupe. Converting the sedan to a coupe, which in reality is a hatchback, costs the car 7.3 inches of overall length – but in reality you lost much more. The W203 was a hot piece of plastic garbage to begin with, and somehow Mercedes made it cheaper by finding $5,000 to cut off the price. Base price was under $26,000, and to put that into perspective, was just $2,000 more than an Acura RSX Type-S. These were clearly targeted towards the younger, more impressionable buyers, and the crazy thing is that it somewhat worked. Yes.
Mercedes-Benz claimed that 40% of these buyers opted for another Mercedes-Benz product after owning their Sport Coupé. That sounds great, but I have to wonder if a large percentage of those owners did so because the Sport Coupé was so bad and they had to get out of that thing and into something nicer. I’m not kidding.
