Mercedes-Benz’s first compact car, and a genuine engineering departure: a tall, short five-door body over a “sandwich floor” that put the engine and transmission on an angled sub-frame beneath the passenger cell, chosen to maximise cabin space and, in theory, to let the whole unit slide harmlessly under the floor in a severe frontal impact.[1]
Weeks after launch in 1997, a Swedish magazine rolled a pre-production A-Class during the “moose test”, a sharp lane-change manoeuvre, and published the footage. Mercedes-Benz first denied the car had a problem, then recalled every unit sold (2,600 cars) and suspended sales for three months while it added electronic stability control and revised the suspension, a fix that cost more than a tenth of the car’s original DM 2.5 billion development budget. ESC was optional on most cars in 1997; the A-Class recall is frequently credited with pushing it toward becoming standard equipment across the industry.
This entry has no separate Wikipedia article of its own: the W168 section lives inside the main A-Class article, alongside the three generations that followed it. The figures here are cited to that section, not to a dedicated page.
