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Huntsville, Alabama; where the back of every single neck is a dead ringer for 'Volcanic Splash 4' from the Dulux colour chart, where family trees have only one branch (‘yew kin divorce me, but yawl alwehs be mah sister…’) and where Mercedes took the ostensibly baffling decision to build the very first M-class back in 1997. Odd decision. After all, Deepest South, US of A has never exactly been renowned as hotbed of Teutonic engineering excellence.

Except, of course, it has. Because, in the hope that no one would notice, it was to post-war Huntsville that the Americans hastily spirited the Third Reich’s finest rocket engineers, and the business of enabling Neil Armstrong’s famously small step got under way in earnest. Indeed, even today you’d be hard pushed to find a local hotel without either a sheet steel-origami Lockheed SR-71 on the front lawn or a supine Saturn V rocket, in its toppled entirety, sprawled beside the swimming pool.

Assured, then, of both an enduring engineering pedigree and a workforce happy to be paid in venison, beer and pick-up truck accessories, the only mistake Mercedes made was in not emulating BMW. Up the road in Spartanburg, those responsible for the X5 insisted that all their key suppliers built factories surrounding the main plant. In not following suit, Mercedes condemned those first M-class efforts to, amongst other mild horrors, a life of the worst quality plastics ever to adorn the cabin of a prestige German car.

With unseemly haste, a shift in production of all Europe-bound cars to Graz in Austria saw quality improve no end, and since then the M-class has gone from strength to strength. Even today, with arch foe Range Rover Sport sales plummeting like a banker off an EC1 window ledge, the M-class boasts the segment’s highest sales figures.


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