Thirty years ago , a car hit the market that forever helped the expansion of the Mercedes-Benz car company. Who is it about? About the sedans 190 and 190E from the W201 series, i.e. the predecessors of today's C-class .
The development of the model was already started in 1977 , when engineers in Stuttgart , Germany got the first ideas to strengthen the model line of the car company with a three-pointed star. Until then, you could only buy the S-class luxury sedan and the 200E mid-size sedan.
The final form of the " baby Benz " arrived in 1982 . Behind the design was Bruno Sacco , and behind the entire car was an incredible amount of money that Mercedes "poured" into it. But for that time, the W201 series was incredibly advanced! Starting with ABS and ending with a multilink rear axle… At that time, no car of a similar size offered that.
Sacco designed a balanced mix between neo-tros elements and old proven classics and a reference to its larger siblings. The result is a design that does not age even thirty years after its launch. Today, the characteristic element of the model is the large front mask . Even two facelifts – in 1988 and 1991 – did not change the design much.
At the time, there was an unprecedented number of engines under the hood. In the beginning, there were only two petrol engines with a power of 90 or 122 hp, but soon the first diesel with a capacity of 72 hp was added, as well as the top of the range at the time – a 2.3-16 engine with a capacity of 185 hp! As time went on, the automaker started exporting existing models overseas and in order to saturate the entire market, it had to come up with additional models – the more powerful 2.5 diesel offered 90 hp, the gasoline 2.6 even 166 hp.
The icing on the cake was the EVO and EVO II versions. You could distinguish them from the classic sedan quite easily, thanks to the aggressive body kit and the large rear wing. Under the hood of both was a 2.5-16 engine that was developed in collaboration with Cosworth . The EVO offered 195 horsepower, the EVO II even up to 235 horsepower! A total of 1004 units of both versions were produced ( 502 units of EVO and 502 units of EVO II ), mainly for reasons of homologation of the car for DTM touring car races.
The W201 series sedans regularly participated in the German DTM Championship . By far the most successful was the 1992 season , when Klaus Ludwig was able to win 16 of the 24 races of this series with a modified EVO II model. However, the car company also won the championship a year earlier .
The production of the model was stopped only ten years after its launch ( in 1992 to be precise). The number of units produced stopped at 1,879,629 . The successor became the W202 series or, if you prefer, the C-class . However, it could not compete with the W201 series sedan in terms of reliability…
