2008 Mercedes-Benz C-Class

Nestled within the sprawling Sindelfingen facility in Stuttgart is Mercedes-Benz's Technical Center, where intelligences both organic and artificial crackle with the quest to build a better automobile. The center's work stations, labs, and test facilities lie at the very heart of the engineering-driven company and normally are locked down as tight as the war room at NATO headquarters. However, the debut of the new C-Class early in January gave company officials cause to open up the Center for a visit by journalists from Mercedes' most important market. Reason? To provide a close look at digital prototyping, Mercedes' new approach to car design, used for the first time to develop the 2008 C-Class.

In their bid to continue the C-Class's reign as the best-selling Mercedes-Benz, designers and engineers first "built" a virtual prototype of the new car, employing some 2130 gigabytes of data (doesn't that perk up your hard drive?). Computer simulations were then used to test virtually every aspect of the car.

There was plenty of paperwork to back up all the impressive digitizations, too. For instance, the "spec book" (the pool of knowledge gained from years of experience) covering the area of comfort alone numbered 360 pages, and it was just one of 250 component-specification books, filling around 6000 pages, used during the R&D. Engineers not only "drove" the virtual car on virtual roads and highways, which saved an enormous amount of time compared with standard practice, they also developed a number of test rigs that wouldn't have looked out of place at NASA. In fact, NASA probably wishes it had some of the stuff we saw in the Technical Center.

We were particularly fascinated by a barbarous test platform that relentlessly shakes and rattles a finished car for the equivalent of about 190,000 miles of life on the roughest of roads. And then there was the Ride Simulator, able to duplicate the car's response to the wide variety of road surfaces stored in the machine's data banks. We took a short "ride" on a virtual circuit of the notoriously harsh Heide test loop in northern Germany, a network of country roads that Mercedes engineers have been using for over 50 years, and were so impressed by the real-world feel from the complex of hydraulic controllers that we actually got a little carsick. (Our lame joke about virtual vomiting was received with the enthusiasm it deserved.) Once initial testing of the virtual prototype was completed, Mercedes built 280 real prototypes and drove them the equivalent of 600 times around the world, on three continents, in search of the toughest conditions a car might ever be asked to endure.

The resulting 2008 C-Class, unveiled at a gala Dr. Z-hosted event in the new Mercedes museum, is longer, wider, and more spacious. Looking far less stodgy than the outgoing model, its styling evokes the wedgy overall shape and prominent wheel arches of its larger siblings. Even better, the new C-Class weighs no more than the outgoing vehicle, despite additional content and greater use of more high-strength steel in the body structure, which is said to be some 13 percent stiffer than the previous sedan.

To help widen the car's appeal (read: try to capture some of the youth market owned by the almighty BMW 3 Series and upstart Audi A4), the C-Class is offered in two models: Luxury and Sport, each with distinctive front-end treatments, trim levels, and suspension tuning. When it goes on sale late this summer, three models will be offered. The C300 Luxury gets a 3.0-liter, 228-horsepower V-6 and a choice of rear or all-wheel drive. The C350 Luxury and C350 Sport are powered by a larger 3.5-liter V-6 with an output of 268 horses. The C300 Sport's engine is matched to a short-throw six-speed manual transmission, while the C300 Luxury and C350 Sport get the current seven-speed automatic gearbox. All models benefit from a new hydraulic shock system with adaptive damping called Agility Control, and all get the Adaptive Brake and Pre-Safe systems from the larger cars. The C's interior is, of course, completely restyled as well and borrows heavily from its more upscale siblings.

Promise of a quicker, quieter, more controllable C-Class has us virtually drooling for the chance to get behind the wheel of a real one. Stay tuned.