German Car Zone

Last Friday I drove a Sprinter 313 CDI rental to Munich with my dad to drop off some furniture for my apartment. We rented it from the local Mazda dealer (don't ask why they rent MB Sprinters...) and I drove it. The "313 CDI" means this Sprinter can carry over 3 tons of payload and the engine has 130-horsepower and is a CDI diesel.

There's not much to say about it. The seating position is high, the seats are barely adjustable and the driving comfort is terrible. The most fun thing about this car was that it was pretty quick. Yep, quick! The 313 CDI engine responded nicely and the gear ratios were. Acceleration was brisk and fluid. On the downside, this thing was very, very loud (a base A, B or C-Class diesel is so much quieter), especially at high speeds on the Autobahn. I brought it up to nearly 160 km/h and the high-speed handling was generally ok. The steering was pretty lifeless though and you basically needed a lot of "Autobahn experience" to control a Sprinter at high speeds with the vague steering.

The 6-speed manual was typical MB: vague and lifeless but the shifts patterns thankfully weren't that bad. The brakes were strong and efficient. It was a hot day and this thing didn't have a functioning A/C unit (air was blown out but not cooled which led me to believe that the A/C wasn't ordered).

I didn't get any chances to photograph it properly so I was only able to take these quick crappy shots of it before returning it to the Mazda dealer.

Sound's like fun

I didn't know about this naming system before. Interesting info.

Lol Chris

Lol. Great review

What, can it carry 3 tons?? I never new the sprinter was such a work horse.

It was a pretty fun truck to drive in some regards, especially when you were pushing it and quick-shifting. This Sprinter wasn't slow!


Anytime.





Yep. 3-tons. There's also a Sprinter 311 CDI which can carry 3-tons+ but with only 110-horsepower.

Thanks for the review Christian.

I've driven both the Sprinter as well as the Vito in older generation FWD and new generation RWD.

One of my more memorable experiences was the time that I was presenting a corporate advanced driver's course at Gerotek for a well known international tool distribution company. This clever company decided that it would be beneficial to provide their drivers with enhanced driver skill and I was asked to help out as an instructor. Quite a lot of pressure as the lead instructor and course director was one the most experienced instructors around having done work for BMW and so on.

So, my job was to facilitate driver training in collision avoidance and skid control on, obviously, a skidpan. Now, remember, I have lots of skidpan experience but I can't say that I'd ever done this in anything remotely resembling a Vito!

So with much trepidation the time came for me to pick out a driver and go and demonstrate the basic principles of under and oversteer on a recently painted (i.e. slippery!) pad. In a Vito van. With 20 odd people watching.
First up was the old generation FWD Vito van sans ESP. Now, demonstrating understeer in FWD is a non-event, instead it's a suitably lengthy oversteer manoeuvre that requires a bit of finesse: catch it too quick and you don't go sideways enough and catch it too late and you're spinning a nice pirouette. So after demonstrating the understeer to my distinctly sceptical driver trainee I proceeded to inform him (and the others over the radio) that I was going to pitch the van into a turn, yank the handbrake and catch the slide with a dose of corrective lock and an application of throttle. Sceptism turned to disbelieving laughter... not good for one's confidence.

So off I went, round the outside of the cones, turn in, lift-off, handbrake and...
You won't believe it; the Vito broke into the most languid, easy-to-catch drift I'd ever thought. I simultaneously wound the lock on and applied just enough throttle to be sideways for 90 degrees around the pad. More practice and longer drifts came easily. Disbelief turned into mass volunteering and the drivers had an absolute blast.

A great success for everyone participating and one of my fondest memories of my instructor days.

Thanks and great little story you shared.

I never liked the Vito / V-Class much because they were of poor quality (made in Spain with poor quality control on MBs part) and because I could never drive them properly. I'm a big guy at 6'4" and everytime you want to depress the clutch pedal, your knee bumps into a slab of plastic belonging to the dashboard. The seating position was therefore pretty bad in those two cars. In my experience smaller people could drive them much easier but tall people with long legs...nope. The same was semi-true for the last generation Sprinter.

I have driven a few trucks myself and the worst part is always leg room. Christian, you are quite tall, I imagine you must have suffered with your legs being cramped in such a tight space?

If only lexus made trucks