Thanks to Millennials being wholly unprepared for the disappointments they currently experience as adults, nostalgia for the 1990s is big right now. But not everything from that decade is so rosy.
Last week when he was visiting our New York office, our man Doug DeMuro was apparently adamant that the original Mercedes ML-Class is the best vehicle ever made. He is wrong. I am not sure why a person would make such a claim. I told him to stop buying drugs from strangers on the Northeast Regional Train.
Anyway, the ML-Class was the right Mercedes for the right time, certainly. Its arrival coincided with America’s then-nascent love affair with SUVs, and helped usher in the age of the luxury SUV.
The problem was the ML was a giant piece of shit. It’s a product of that era of Mercedes-Benz where the suits decided the whole “overengineer cars to last forever” thing was bad for business, leading to a period of abysmal quality and reliability. It took years for Mercedes to recover from the bad taste left in buyers’ mouths by the ML- and C-Class. Possibly the worst car from the worst era of Mercedes.
But maybe not the worst 1990s car. What do you think that was?
Contact the author at patrick@jalopnik.com.