‘Swishing round a roundabout, the handling was so tight and sure, I felt like a shark’
They call it the saloon that thinks it's a coupe. "The Mercedes CLS," I was sometimes heard to murmur, leaning against it, doing a voice like Sean Connery, "the car made of muscle." Then I'd set the alarm off and electronically immobilise it, but it was nothing the manual couldn't fix.
So much car jargon, I often think, exists to replace perfectly serviceable words that car buffs don't know about because they never speak to anybody. I give you "oddment stowage", the term they use for for "small drawer". And yet, when people talk about the "build quality" of a Merc, there is no other phrase for it. Everything you open, everything you close, every time you sit down, every time you move, there it is, in a noise or a texture or some ineffable combination of the two: build quality. One might almost just say "quality" for short.
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