Hi. You may want to consider the following. We have owned a first generation A170CDI from new. Bought it in 1998 and kept it for 9 years. Was full option. Apart for some minor, but real expensive, repairs, nothing against the car. Service and repairs are expensive because it takes hours to get to the engine itself and hours to put everything back. Confort is better than the A2, more room side wise, front seats are more "coushonning" but do not hold you in tight curve.
We too have an A170CDI (year 2001 face lift) from new (collected from dealer with less than 5 miles on the clock
). Judging from your post we have been extremely lucky with ours as it has been completely trouble free - apart from a crack on a plastic pipe between the turbo and intake box around 3 years old. The replacement part cost well under £50, but the merc labour was nearly £200 because they had to "drop the engine" to gain access to the pipe. Apart from this we found the car cheap to maintain requiring an A/B service every two years. The A-Service comes in around the £100 mark at a main Mercedes dealership (okay we always proivde our own fully synthetic Mobil 1 oil sourced from Halfords at less than £40 on sale to keep costs down - but this simple trick causes Mercedes to knock close to £100 off their fix price servicing!!! Even the lady at receiption comments on this savings every time she prepares the bill for us
). Likewise our B-Service has always been less than £200 (Mercedes told us it needed a brake fluid change at its second B service, but then duely forgot to do it and did not bill us for the extra charge either - we pointed this out when we saw the bill, so they immediately gave us a free brake fluid change to make up for their error, so this has also helped us to get our B service under £200 - strange that they have not since reported that our brake fluid needed changing!).
Annoying, despite garaging the car from new, we had some light rust coming through the rear wheel arches which Mercedes took care of immediately - even gave us a new Mercedes courtesy car to play with for 2 weeks while our car was in at their bodyshop. No further rust problems since.
Insurance has been great (via LV) with fully comp coming in under £160 for missus and myself to drive on a London post-code with class 1 business use. For the last 2 years we have managed to get £70 cash back each year by renewing our LV insurance via Quidco, so the fully comp insurance came in at under £100 with our 5 years no claims bonus! This is shockingly cheap as our A2 insurance comes in at around £350 with a similar no claims bonus, annual mileage and post-code AND that is without Class-1. Unforutnately Quido has now reduced their cash back for LV from £70 to only £20, so it looks like this year our A-Class insurance will be raise above the £100 mark
.
All in all, missus will not drive the A2 due to the manual gearbox which simply cannot compete with the slick Merc 5 speed auto box and the poorer visibility on the A2 does not help matters either.
