The 2019 Mercedes-Benz C300 Coupe Is Love At First Drive

The word “sexy” evokes thoughts of beauty, lust, and love… Sexy also perfectly describes the Mercedes-Benz C300. It’s a coupe as only Mercedes can make one.

The 2019 Mercedes-Benz C300 coupe is a 2+2 two-door with European style. Powering this compact beauty is a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder that outputs a beautiful 255HP and 273 pound-feet of torque. Power is routed through a nine-speed automatic transmission, propelling the 17-inch wheels in either rear-wheel or all-wheel drive.

That’s a little more power this year than the C300 had last year. Mercedes also added Apple CarPlay and Android Auto as standard features for 2019. These little changes go with the timeless styling of the Mercedes-Benz C300–which causes double-take whiplash regularly– and the wonderful drivetrain underneath the car.

There is beauty to the C300’s exterior, of course, and it’s readily admissible as evidence of the car’s sexiness. Where the real beauty happens, as Oprah would say, is inside. The interior is immaculate and wonderfully designed with the finest quality materials and workmanship available to the Germans. It’s singular flaw, the touchpad interface for infotainment, is there as if the engineers had to be sure there would be something to fix later. The infotainment is a besmirch that only proves that man cannot achieve perfection on his own.

Mercedes combines the beautiful exterior with that wondrous interior and with a powertrain that makes it very near perfection. The little powerhouse of an engine happily throws juice into the transmission, which shifts quickly and precisely to power the wheels. The drive quality of the 2019 Mercedes C300 is a testament to the excellence of the German engineer.

Sure, you can get bigger-engined versions of this car. The C43 and C63 from AMG offer more power for the offing, but that does not make them immediately better than the C300. A car this size does not necessarily benefit from a huge V6 or V8 engine and their gobs of power. Because Mercedes knows that some of us understand this, the C300 can be purchased with the AMG Line packaging that adds the engineering and style upgrades of those variants without adding the unnecessary raw power they have.

It’s that concert of excellence: the combination that is the C300 that really makes it an object of our adoration. It combines so many great things into one beautiful package that one cannot help but wonder at it all.

The 2019 Mercedes-Benz C300 Coupe starts at $41,400, and our fully-loaded tester rang in at a not-so-insignificant $63,375.