Richard Yarrow’s opinion for www.startrescue.co.uk, providing low cost Vehicle Recovery cover.
The word that springs to mind is ‘blimey!’. This is a striking new concept car from Mercedes, but the name of it will give you a rather large clue about where in the firm’s range it will fit. This is the Concept A-Class, and is a thinly disguised version of the all-new third generation model which will go on sale in the not-to-distant future.
The MkII car debuted 2004 so is ripe for replacement, but it’s the original A-Class from 1997 that sticks in the minds of most people.
Why? Because it was the smallest car Merc had ever launched, and was a world away from the big saloons the company continues to be most famous for. I remember driving the A-Class through North London where I lived at the time and people literally stopping and staring at this quirky, upright mini-MPV with the famous three-pointed star on the front.
But the MkI A-Class is best remembered for its acrobatic endeavours.
This is the car which famously rolled over during media testing at launch, and had to be recalled and re-engineered so stability control could be added. I was just about to start my career as a motoring journalist when the ‘Moosegate’ scandal hit and remember seeing the published photos – this was long before YouTube! – and being genuinely stunned as the car flipped during a high-speed lane-change, as though avoiding a moose in the road (it was Swedish journalists who rolled it, they have moose in the road…) I’m sure it didn’t seem like it as the time, but the incident actually did Mercedes a lot of good. The A-Class was, as the time, the smallest car to benefit from stability control. It’s now standard on all vehicles, and has to be by law, and Moosegate probably made that happen quicker than it would have done without the scandal.
Breakdown Cover from 
