From the March 2018 issue

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Phillips has outed me for lusting after history’s ugliest muscle car, the googly-eyed 1970 Dodge Coronet Super Bee. It’s a muscle car that wears glasses, ferchrisakes. Even the Mopar faithful draw down the corners of their mouths and avert their eyes when confronted with the ’70. And let’s just say, people who welcome the Dodge Warlock into their fold are not exactly the most discerning aesthetes.

This revelation comes at an especially awkward time for me because I was aiming to appear to have good taste. Further, I have written this very column about another of my unconventional loves, this one newfound. So now it’s apparently a pattern with me.

Whatever. I fell in love with a commercial van and I feel simultaneously giddy and guilty about it. But look, this is no metal mule like the Maruti Suzuki Super Carry. It’s no Tata Xenon Yodha, which is an actual vehicle that couldn’t possibly live up to its spectacular name. No, I fell for a Mercedes. Okay, it’s a Spanish-built box of a Mercedes, but still, it’s a Mercedes, and that counts for something. And it’s not just a box. The Mercedes Metris passenger van is a box with three rows of seats mounted inside it, big windows circling its body, and stuff like power-sliding doors, heated front seats, and—wait for it—carpet. This means that while I could carry a load of toilets or pesticides in my Metris, I wouldn’t necessarily be expected to.

I never pictured myself as a commercial-vehicle slappy. Growing up, I didn’t care about toy trucks. Instead, I played with an Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle and Matchbox versions of the Saab Sonett III and the Lamborghini Marzal. Compounding my shame: Every dork in the car-journalism game collectively fell for commercial vans about the time that the Metris’s big brother, the Sprinter, first arrived in the U.S. I was dubious, knowing that these people were just pulling a hip-to-be-square routine. That their affection for such vehicles was undergirded not by the vans’ merits but by the shallow appeal of the strange as well as the ready availability of vans in press fleets to move their stuff from one apartment to the next. And yet, now I find myself among them, at least in the case of the Metris. By all rights, I should hate this four-cylinder–powered airport shuttle. But I can’t stop liking it. It is utterly without artifice. It hasn’t been styled in any significant way, beyond having its hard edges smoothed. It looks pretty much like an old VW EuroVan. But it’s a EuroVan that doesn’t suck to drive. It is free from feature overkill. It has no integrated intercom system that enables (and therefore encourages) children in the third row to make demands of the front-row parental types. There is, after all, a reason they were banished to the third row in the first place.

It’s honest goods. It has possibly the smallest wheel-size-to-body-height ratio this side of a Snap-on Classic 60 rolling tool cabinet. But big wheels on family vehicles are dumb and heavy, and they ruin the ride quality of just about everything that wears them. The Metris is powered by a turbocharged 2.0-liter four. That should really suck, but it doesn’t. It produces only 208 horsepower, but it extrudes a fat 258 pound-feet of torque at only 1250 rpm. You’ll notice that 1250 rpm isn’t all that far above idle speed. So, yeah, the roughly 4800-pound Mercedes is not as quick as a V-6–powered minivan. But that’s hardly the point. At 8.4 seconds to 60 mph and with a top speed of 101 mph, the Metris is quick and fast enough. But more important, around town, the Metris is responsive. And while it has a longer wheelbase than both the Honda and Chrysler minivans, it also has a tighter turning radius. On the highway, it clocks along at 85 mph with an unwavering sense of straight ahead, rare among vehicular billboards. Its steering feels more direct and linear than not just other vans but most other cars.

Also to its credit: It has the current market’s most outdated nav and infotainment systems. Perfect! When was the last time I used a car’s nav system for anything but professional investigation? Probably about the time that the Metris’s system would have been considered cutting edge. Here’s a secret: I carry with me at all times a small computer that allows me to pinpoint my location on the planet and directs me to wherever I might like to go.

So save me your buggy tech and your swooping plastic trim and your gratuitous surface excitement. I don’t mind driving a vehicle that is exactly what it appears to be, particularly when it’s thoughtfully engineered to serve its mission in life.

And in my hands, its mission in life was sleddin’. Not only did our Jupiter Red Metris comfortably transport eight people (many of them not yet fully grown), two tandem sleds, and four cheap-ass plastic saucer sleds to a local hill, but when we’d escaped without major injury, I might have drifted the rear-drive Metris through the empty, snow-covered parking lot near the hill. Hey, the kids gotta learn about countersteering somewhere. Not going to do that in your Odyssey.

The Super Bee is harder to justify.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io