10 awesome cars for the price of a Mercedes A-Class

Much like anyone who’s walked through the doors of Tiffany’s, the modern car market is gobsmacking in just how big the prices are and how little you seem to get in exchange for it. Case in point: the Mercedes A-Class – the fourth best-selling car in the UK last year – costs £25,975. And that not-exactly-bargain-basement price will only get you behind the wheel of the absolute base-model A-Class.

Clearly, there’s quite a bit of opportunity in that sort of money, should one brave the unforgiving seas (and, y’know, lack of new-car warranty) of the second-hand market.

Now, the exceedingly obvious and obviously exceptional choice is a 997 Porsche Carrera S. And if you’re 1) a bit time-poor, and 2) actually coming here for advice on second-hand car-buying, then you should probably get the Carrera and definitely consider better counsel. Because our ideas are almost always geared around the most entertaining outcome, which is quite often not the best one. And to that point, we promise to replace the broken couch at the local pub, just as soon as time and finances permit.

But as much as the 997 Carrera is about as close as we can bring you to the nexus of interesting and not entirely ruinous, we’ve already recommended it enough to start drawing a salary as Porsche sales reps. With that said, its combination of German badge cachet and Germanic engineering did give us something of an idea.

If you’re heading into the Mercedes end of town, you’re unlikely to be the sort that’s willing to settle for something with any less tech, toys or indeed badge bragging rights. So you’ll notice that we’re taking heaving great lungfuls of rarefied air in this edition of This Is A Great Idea, Right Up Until You Get The Bill For Your First Service. That’s right: 10 awesome cars for the price of a new A-Class, each just as German, and none with any less prestige than the three-pointed star itself.

An A-Class is many things. New, tech-laden, warrantied, a hatchback, a Mercedes and very definitely a motor vehicle.

What it patently is not is a 4.2-litre V8, all-wheel-drive estate car with more than 400bhp and a six-speed manual. Helpfully, the late-2000s Audi RS4 Avant is exactly these things – and more. It is a way to take all the practicalities and concessions needed for modern life and fling them at the nearest horizon quicker than is even remotely necessary.

Sure, you’ll need to rev the 4.2-litre V8 out to its upper limits to really get into that peculiarly Audi phenomenon of taking your average road trip and simply deleting distance. But if you are in some sort of quandary about delaying a gear change on a sweet six-speed manual to let the V8 ahead of you rev to 8,000rpm, you may not be at the website you meant to get to. But that’s OK – stick around for a while. Pull up a chair. Grab a drink.

If you’re in the market for a Mercedes A-Class, there’s likely something about the badge that’s swayed you. After all, you get broadly the same thing in a VW Golf, Mazda 3 or Ford Focus. But none of them are a Benz, are they?

But if you are swayed by the prestige of the three-pointed star, it really does undercut the argument a touch if you buy the cheapest new one available. Especially when for the same money, you can get the flagship of the entire Mercedes range, with the all-important input of the engine masters (and now F1 juggernauts) at AMG.

Yes, it can only be the S65 AMG, replete with two turbos, 12 cylinders, 600bhp, and a bona fide IWC Schaffhausen clock in the dashboard. This is the pinnacle of German luxury and performance, a technological ne plus ultra that casts a shadow big enough to obscure the best efforts of Audi, BMW and indeed Merc’s own Maybach division. In fact, if you remember your Top Gear TV trips at all, you’ll recall that the S65 was up against the Rolls-Royce Ghost and the, er, ‘Bentley Mulsanne’. And you thought the regular Mercedes badge had clout.

Yes, yes. Bentley is as British as tea and pubs and the Royal family, right? Well, yes, in that tea is from China, pubs are a Roman concept and the pukka British Windsors are in fact rebranded Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.

And as any Bentley from the past two decades (and counting) is going to be a product of the Volkswagen Group, we feel including the Saxe-Bentley is well within our self-imposed discipline. Then there’s the small matter that the Flying Spur is based on the platform that underpinned the VW Phaeton. Also, this is our list, and if you don’t like it, we’ll take our ball and go home.

As befits a big Bentley, the ride is as gentle as day spa music, yet it manages to make it through corners without folding itself over like... um, a day spa towel. But really, any ideas of handling, or indeed visits to day spas, are rendered immaterial by the presence of a 550bhp W12 engine. Thanks to Vee Dub’s top-spec powerplant (and attendant all-wheel-drive system), this 2.5 tonne, ultra-luxe saloon can dismiss a 0-60 dash in less than five seconds, before trundling out to 195mph with all the histrionics of a Noam Chomsky interview.

It’s hardly pretty, but then that’ll be pretty hard to notice from inside your insulated cabin, pootling along at the national speed limit with a (whisper it) Rolls-Royce-esque amount of power in reserve.

It’s hardly a secret that we’re fans of – to the point of fawning over – the AMG 6.2-litre V8. It is a hand-built, motorsports-ready leviathan from a company whose stock in trade is making more power from their tower than anyone else.

But what this particular tower of power also does is overshadow what really should be a shining achievement in its own right: AMG’s supercharged 5.4-litre V8. And one of the very best ways to sample it... well, would be some form of engine swap in an MX-5, or something. But the easiest way would have to be the E55 AMG.

In case the image didn’t already give the game, the game after that and indeed the entire competition away, the E55 AMG is categorically not a sports car. It is an estate, a wagon, a really long hatchback or however people generally describe these things in your neck of the woods. Or, for the Australians in the crowd, your burnt-out bit of bushland. Pick the estate and opt for the jump-seats option and you have a seven-seat pillar of practicality.

What you also have is 469bhp and a basically world-ending 516lb ft, which goes some way to explaining how a 1.8-tonne wagon can haul itself from rest to 60mph in four and a half seconds and on to its limited 155mph less than 20 seconds later.

As you might expect, it is as complex as an F-35 fighter jet and, when pushed, does its best imitation of a jet engine’s fuel economy. We could make similar comparisons about the running costs, too. But then you are getting an exceptional amount of car for the money and, at least in Britain, only the best and most cosseted examples will even come close to the cost of a new A-Class. So you’re free to put the savings aside for tyres, petrol, more tyres, more petrol and a service bill that rivals the beginning of Up for sheer tear-jerking savagery.

Modern life abounds with logical fallacies. Water is also wet and fire is hot. Helpfully, in the car world, we really only have to deal with a few: your average ad hominem (you disagree and therefore know nothing), tu quoque (you’re in no position to criticise because you know nothing), and anecdotal argument (my personal experience means that what you do know means nothing). And, of course, the fallacy on which almost all car forums are built on: no true Scotsman.

And the car world has that one in spades – cars should be made of steel, not plastic, rear-drive is the only proper layout, you can’t enjoy yourself with an automatic and any other number of golden rules laid down by self-appointed arbiters of what is and isn’t correct.

Which brings us to a few that are perhaps a little more relevant to the 928: ‘All good Porsches are air-cooled’, for one, and ‘Proper Porsches have their engine in the back’ to complete the set. And, like most statements in the no-true-Scotsman oeuvre, they’re both complete tosh. But what these demonstrably false slices of stupidity have done – at least until recently – is keep the price of a great many water-cooled and front-engined Porsches in the realms of reality.

Take... well, the 928 for example. This is the car that Porsche thought was good enough to replace the 911, after all – a fate that was ultimately averted, of course, but an idea with more than a few arguments in its favour.

An all-aluminium, race-derived V8 engine, for instance. Or pretty much bang-on 50-50 weight distribution, thanks to a transaxle. Double wishbone suspension all around – in an era when the 911 was still rocking torsion bars. And then there’s the passive rear steering and the so-called ‘Weissach axle’, the latter basically solving unintended oversteer and making the 928 a much happier place than the 911, which was quickly earning a reputation for being a bit of a widowmaker. The axle worked so well that Porsche brought a refined version of it to the 993 Carrera and used the same basic Weissach wizardry in almost every Porsche sports car since then. So, one behalf of the 928, you’re welcome. And, on behalf of anyone with £25,000, you are very welcome to go and buy one. Just an idea.

‘Oh look,’ you’re thinking. ‘Top Gear is donning its Captain Obvious get-up again and trotting out the BMW M3.’ But that’s like saying ‘Oh look, they’ve cast Robert De Niro in a film’, or ‘Oh look, that guitarist is playing a Fender Stratocaster’.

It’s absolutely true that for every problem, there is a solution that’s neat, obvious and wrong (thanks HL Mencken), but every now and then life throws you a bone and offers up an answer that’s neat, obvious and absolutely bang-on.

De Niro, Strats and indeed the M3 are (if we say so ourselves) perfect outliers to Mencken’s razor – dynamic powerhouses whose obviousness should in no way diminish just how right of an answer they almost always are.

And if you have Mercedes A-Class money, a hankering for the cachet of ‘premium’ German marques and even a passing interest in owning a forgiving, daily driveable sports saloon – that just happens to house a manic, race-derived V8 under the bonnet – are you really willing to give that up just because someone might call you Captain Obvious?

OK, so we’ll admit that those in the market for a small, efficient hatchback might not immediately see how a twin-turbo V10 uber-wagon is a viable alternative. But that’s OK; as practised practitioners of mental gymnastics, we’ll lay out the logical leaps you’ll need for this to all make sense.  

The Audi’s boot, while very large and practical, is actually smaller than you’d get from a similar-vintage M5 Touring or E63 estate. This means it’s closer in dimensions to a hatchback load space than its peers and is therefore a more viable alternative to the bigger wagons.

The RS6’s V10 makes 570bhp out of the box, which is perfectly potty enough without the simple software tune that bumps it up to 640bhp or so. And this is a lot, especially considering that the Mercedes A-Class you’re buying for similar money will have 134bhp. But, if you don’t put your foot all the way down on the accelerator, it’s eminently possible to only use 134bhp and drive at the same rate as the A-Class. The 430 to 500bhp left over is merely a reserve, for emergencies and the like.

When it was new, the RS6 was the most powerful estate car in the world. When the Mercedes A45 AMG was new, it was the most powerful hot hatch in the world. Frankly, this kinship perfectly aligns the RS6 Avant with the base-model A-Class you can get for the same money.

Clearly, a used RS6 and new A-Class are too fundamentally similar to discount as genuine rivals. And they’re both German as well! Really, it’s almost like seeing double.

The 968 was, to be fair, the entry-level Porsche. And in one way, that makes it a perfect used-car counterpoint to the entry-level Mercedes we’re benchmarking it against.

In another way, that makes it a rather unloved thing. After all, entry-level is just a euphemism for cheap, isn’t it? Well, no, obviously. Saying an entry-level Porsche is in some way lacking is like saying an entry-level Rolex or Riva speedboat or Two-Rock amplifier is in some way lacking – these are companies who cannot countenance building bad things just to fit to a price point. Entry-level here also never really means cheap, either.

But thanks to our old friend depreciation (and the fact that the 911 hogs the limelight), £25,000 will easily get you the ultimate iteration of Porsche’s water-cooled, four-cylinder, front-engined cars – a lineage that dates back to the 1970s and the Porsche 924.

So what, exactly, is the 968? In essence, it’s an evolution of the much better known 944. The story goes that so much was changed in the update that Porsche decided it deserved its own model code, and the 968 was born. According to Porsche, as much as 80 per cent of the 968 was entirely new, which a) does mean the 968 rather earned its new moniker, and b) is not exactly your average model update.

The four-cylinder engine was stroked (no sniggering at the back, please) to three litres – yes, just four 750cc cylinders, which is basically the same size as the gigantic LS V8. Even so, it’s thoroughly oversquare – i.e. the bore is bigger than the stroke – so it has bottom-end poke thanks to large displacement and a rev-happy top end, ably assisted by four-valve heads. This means 240bhp at full noise and a fat torque curve with the volume dialled back a bit, to murder an analogy.

In a sub-1400kg car, with perfect 50-50 weight balance and nearly two decades’ worth of finessing and honing, this makes for a pretty potent Porsche, however entry-level it might have been.

One of the many sad facts about life is that sometimes, truly outstanding ideas meet with little more than a lukewarm reception, purely because they ask us to make a leap we’re not intellectually prepared for. And so often in the car world, this lukewarm reception is held for cars that try to do more with less. For every Mini or Fiat 500, there’s a Smart car, Audi A2 or indeed a BMW i3.

Does the small size trigger a backfire effect somewhere in our subconscious? Are we so used to limitless luxury at the expense of economy that any attempt to increase the latter feels like an attack on the former? And how long can one gaze into their navel before the navel gazes back?

In any case, the i3 seems to have never sizzled so much as sat in a tepid bain-marie. BMW’s sold some 200,000 of the things since 2013, so there’s no call for any particular hue and cry, but it’s far from what a car with so many new and fantastic ideas deserved. It’s made from hollow carbon-fibre and aluminium to keep weight down, which means it’s 300kg lighter than the adorable Honda e and has longer range. It manages to seat four, but only takes up the road space of your average pram. It uses its battery power at a fraction of the rate of most electric cars, so its smaller battery can take you further than you’d expect. And, because it’s a small battery, it’ll recharge more quickly.

Yes, the modern way is to fit a battery big enough to make General Patton priapic and chew through amp hours and lesser cars like they’re nothing. But the i3 shows that there’s another way. Just another way we were never clever enough to get on board with.

Happily, all is not lost. While the i3 is not long for this world, there’s still a wide selection of these incredibly unique and likely never-repeated cars available for £25,000. Or you could have a regular hatchback, of course.

By now, you’ll likely be familiar with the Audi RS2 – Genesis for Audi’s properly quick estate cars, and the only one doused in Porsche’s secret sauce. And it’s a very good thing. So good, in fact, that you’ll be completely unable to buy one for £25,000. Or anything approaching that, to be honest.  

And we see two answers to this conundrum: 1) somehow find another £25,000 or so – how you do so is entirely a matter for your own conscience – or 2) consider a car that’s comparable and still within budget.

Should you choose option two, you could very easily pick up a V8 RS4 or V10 RS6 within budget. But what if you still want the old-school Audi styling, vibes and – crucially – size? Luckily, that’s in reach, too.

Yes, it’s the overlooked and underloved S2. And for the life of us, we can’t figure out why that is. For your money, you’ll get Audi’s famous 2.2-litre, 20-valve five-cylinder engine, and the attendant 230bhp and 260lb ft it offers, funnelled – as you might expect – through Audi’s quattro all-wheel-drive system.

You get rock-solid build quality, modern-classic styling and exterior dimensions that make a mockery of our ideas of a modern small hatchback. The S2 Avant – a five-door estate, remember – is just five centimetres longer than a new A-Class, and it’s 10cm narrower. Just imagine how much easier stonewalled B-roads and inner-city width restrictors will be.

Also, yes, we do realise that we’ve just flirted with genuine practicality and apologise wholeheartedly for the inconvenience.

The keen-eyed among you will notice that this is not a car. It fails in the basic precepts of car-dom, by not having enough wheels on the road, the absence of a steering wheel in the cabin, and indeed the absence of a cabin.

While we’re mentioning it, the Ducati 916 isn’t exactly what you’d call German, either. As the name suggests, it is quite Italian. And the 916 came out before Ducati became a part of Lamborghini, and therefore a part of Audi... and therefore a part of Volkswagen. So we can’t even fudge it like we did with the Bentley.

But as the Ducati 916 is the completely unshackled, unburdened and borderline unbeatable choice, we figure it’s earned a spot. And who doesn’t want a dash of automotive intemperance after a smorgasbord of Teutonic sobriety?

Also, it’s worth remembering that the 916 – well aside from being a piece of rolling sculpture designed by Massimo Tamburini, the single greatest motorcycle designer who’s ever lived – is still a Ducati superbike, imbued with the most vaunted name in motorsport and adorned with big-name upgrades to suspension (Ohlins) and brakes (Brembo) in order to make the it worthy of the Senna moniker.

It’s rare, gorgeous, and full of motorsports and design pedigree that’s impossible to repeat. And even the best examples will cost comfortably less than a new base-spec A-Class. But if you don’t want to ride an inordinately gorgeous, peerlessly invigorating and absolutely immaculate piece of history, that’s absolutely your decision.