Mercedes sport utility luxurious, powerful

  • BY WARREN BROWN
    The Washington Post
  • Posted: Friday, March 14, 2008 12:01 a.m.
    UPDATED: Thursday, March 22, 2012 11:44 a.m.
  • Text size: A A A
The 2008 Mercedes-Benz GL450 sport utility seats up to seven people. Cargo capacity is 83 cubic feet with middle and rear seats folded down and 14.3 cubic feet with those seats up and passengers seated.
/DaimlerThe 2008 Mercedes-Benz GL450 sport utility seats up to seven people. Cargo capacity is 83 cubic feet with middle and rear seats folded down and 14.3 cubic feet with those seats up and passengers seated.

Life is a matter of surprise and compromise. One leads to the other, often in reverse order. If you can get over the business of things not going as expected, you can learn something and move forward.

Consider what happened last week.

My associate, Ria Manglapus, and I had grand plans to continue our search for the perfect family car. But we discovered that every family's definition of perfection is different and that income, class and familial circumstance cannot accurately predict what definition a family will choose.

A 2008 Mercedes-Benz GL450 sport-utility vehicle has arrived. It cost at least $25,000 more than the $30,000 ceiling Ria and I arbitrarily had set for the "perfect" family car. The GL450 is not a car. It is a full-size, all-wheel-drive, luxury sport utility vehicle, albeit one built with car-like unit-body construction. The GL450 comes with a 4.7-liter, 335-hp V-8 engine. It is anything but fuel-economical. The thing drinks only premium unleaded gasoline, and lots of it.

Yet our otherwise sensible families, the people who originally goaded us into looking for the "perfect" family car, were mostly delighted with the GL450, a vehicle that neither family would consider in the real marketplace. They were impressed by the luxury of the GL450, including its panoramic sunroof that framed an azure sky, supple leather seats, vast abundance of informational and entertainment electronics, power and smoothness of its V-8 engine, seven-passenger seating capacity and, of course, gleaming Mercedes-Benz tri-star badge.

I was surprised by the GL450's lightness of being. It has a curb weight, which is the weight with factory-installed equipment and fluids, of 5,280 pounds. Yet largely due to its tight, aluminum-intensive construction, it drove and handled like a much lighter vehicle. It is no exaggeration to say that its entire road performance was surprisingly, pleasingly sports-like.

But there was no way that I was going to drive the GL450 to New York to assist my daughters. My decision brought great rejoicing to the Manglapus clan — for a while.

"I was happy that we were getting something with seven seats. But it turned out that we could not possibly carry seven people and all of their luggage in the GL450," Ria said, conceding that luxury does not necessarily mean maximum utility.

Still, there was joy in Manglapusville: the leather, the sunroof, the power, the mobile entertainment venue that included video and the Mercedes-Benz badge.

Then came fill-up time. Horrors! Close to $85 for a full tank. Ria returned the GL450 with a request: "Please tell me that somewhere there is a seven-passenger or eight-passenger vehicle that can carry more luggage and not cost a fortune to operate."

There is, Ria. In fact there are several.