SINGAPORE – Here’s something to think about: nobody likes diesel cars here. Around 70 people buy them every month, which is roughly three to four percent of the market.

Hybrid cars don’t have that many friends, either. They’ve been available for over a decade, and yet by the end of July this year there were only 4,831 petrol-electric hybrid cars on the road here, versus 611,289 petrol cars.

And here we have a car that falls into both unpopular camps. Meet the Mercedes-Benz E 300 Bluetec Hybrid, which pairs a 2.1-litre turbodiesel engine with a mild hybrid system, comprising a 27bhp motor and a 800watt-hour lithium-ion battery.

Of course, just as you couldn’t care less about what kind of processor your smartphone has (unless you have no life) or what makes your fridge run, you could simply think of the E 300 Bluetec Hybrid as one more E-Class model to consider.

After all, you drive it normally, as you would any other Mercedes, and no, you don’t have to find a wall socket to plug it into.

Uniquely for a hybrid too, the car’s battery lives somewhere under the bonnet, so it doesn’t eat up any useable space in the cabin or boot.

The system adds 110kg to the E 250 CDI that forms the basis for the car, but it’s there to enable the big Merc to cut its appetite for fuel. Check out these figures: to cover 100km the E 300 needs 4.1 litres of diesel (versus 4.9 litres for the E 250 CDI), so it uses less of a fuel that costs less to buy.

The carbon output from the tailpipes is commensurately tiny, at just 109g/km, but even if you care so little about conservation that you’d happily boil pandas for their meat, there are 500 reasons to like the Merc.  The turbodiesel might be small, but it cranks out that amount of peak torque in Nm, and it’s available from just 1,600rpm. 

Tromp on the throttle, then, and the Mercedes gets up and goes with a sort of whoosh, and with the electric motor sometimes chipping in with an extra 250Nm of shove, it’s an indecently quick car for something so frugal.

I don’t know why the 0 to 100km/h time is the same as the E 250 CDI’s, at 7.5 seconds, but it probably has something to do with the extra heft of the hybrid tech. Nevertheless, the E 300 has an addictive rush of torque that’ll make it damnably hard for you to drive with the kind of light foot need to turn that 4.1 litres of diesel into 100km.

And since there’s only a relatively small engine over the front wheels, with the hybrid motor residing where the transmissions’ torque convertor would normally be, the E 300 has a nose that’s willingly deflected off course. The quicker ‘Direct Steer’ system is standard, so easy flicks of the steering wheel are all that are needed to hustle the Mercedes through corners in a way that makes it as much as mean machine as a Green one.

Still, there’s an elegance about the Mercedes that many hybrid cars share. The motor can drive the car by itself, whisking it along silently up to 35km/h (and for up to a km), and when you’re at standstill the engine isn’t needed, so it shuts down. Meanwhile, because the a/c compressor is motor-driven, the flow of cool air doesn’t stop.

The Mercedes has a ‘sailing’ mode too, which lets the motor keep the car going along once it’s up to speed while the turbodiesel takes a nap, and it can do this at up to 160km/h. Then there’s the silent, fuel-free way it trudges around a carpark, ending your drive with a bit of quiet calm.

It’s all very pleasurable in its own right, and it’s a surprise that Singaporeans haven’t taken to hybrid technology a bit better. 

The hesitance about diesel is a little easier to understand, because in the Mercedes’ case, there’s no getting around the fact that the E 300 sounds, well, pretty much like a taxi. A cultured voice, it doesn’t have.  

If you’re particular about that, this isn’t the car for you, but in all honesty to give up the mechanical elegance of the car because of the way it sounds seems like folly to me. Zoe Tay doesn’t exactly have a voice like an angel, but you don’t see anyone complaining.

Perhaps another thing to put you off might be the way the diesel engine sometimes sends a shudder through the car when it starts up. It’s worth pointing out too, that we didn’t get near 4.1L/100km. A careful drive netted us 5L/100km, and if you’re careless or heavy-footed with the accelerator you’ll probably see around 7L/100km. 

Still, after I drove the car for 129km the computer told me there was 1,072km left in the tank. This means if you fill up your existing wheels once a week now, you’ll probably do it once a fortnight at most with the E 300. 

I may not be able to tell if you’ll take to the Mercedes, but I can certainly tell you that its fuel-saving technologies work pretty well. 

NEED TO KNOW
Engine               2,143cc, 16V, turbodiesel in-line 4 
Power                204bhp at 3800rpm
Torque               500Nm at 1600 – 1800rpm
Motor                27bhp, 250Nm
Battery              0.8kWh, Lithium ion
System Total     230bhp, 590Nm
Gearbox            7-speed automatic
Top Speed         242km/h
0-100km/h       7.5 seconds                        
Fuel efficiency  4.1L/100km
CO2                  109g/km
Price                $295,888 with COE
Availability       Now

Also Consider: BMW ActiveHybrid 5, Lexus GS Hybrid

Photos by Leow Ju-Len (Aren’t they nice?) 

Electric Avenue
Hybrid cars are still poorly understood here, so if you drive an E 300 Bluetec Hybrid you’ll probably have to field questions about it from perplexed friends and relatives. Here are the common ones.

How do you charge the battery?
Just by driving it around. The Mercedes tops up its on-board battery by recapturing energy when you brake. Sometimes when there’s excess kinetic energy from the turbodiesel engine, some of it is used to top up the battery.

How does it help you save fuel?
Several ways. The engine shuts down automatically at red lights (while the air-con stays on), but also when you’re in the carpark or crawling along in a jam — electric drive is available up to 35km/h and for a kilometre. The E 300 can also glide along at up to 160km/h with the engine dead and the electric motor keeping the momentum going, a mode called ‘sailing’.

How much will you save at the pumps?
That’s entirely up to you and how you drive, but officially you’ll spend just $1,332.50 on fuel if you drive 20,000km a year, the average for a Singapore car. Budget an extra 75 percent if you’re the impatient sort. That said, most hybrid owners never ‘make the difference back’ at the pumps.

So why bother?
Because a hybrid car is nicer to drive. There’s a nice boost from the motor when you want to overtake, and the seamless way the Mercedes juggles two power sources automatically is admirable. If you respect good engineering, you’ll enjoy it. There’s the elegance of recapturing energy that would otherwise be wasted on braking, and the e-drive mode gives each journey a calming, silent finale.