Imagine a Mercedes-Benz B-Class with rear-wheel drive and a 388 hp 5.5 litre V8 shoehorned into it. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to get your hands on one – the B 55 is an one-off example built by trainees at Merc’s Rastatt plant as a means of showing what can be done if you set your mind to it.

The car was built by a team of twelve second-year and third-year trainees specialising in production mechanics and automotive mechatronics, led by foremen Andreas Wurz from the technical vocational training department and Matthias Rieger from the electrics/electronics installation section.

The design evolved on the basis that the spatial concept of the B-Class was to remain unchanged, with minor indications of the conversion work from an exterior point of view, though the interior was to be upgraded in line with the new vehicle class being aspired to. Most importantly, the vehicle would have to be suitable for day-to-day driving.

The donor car came in the form of a B 200 CDI which had been delegated to the training workshop for learning purposes. As the trainees completely disassembled the car, Wurz went in search of a suitable engine and found what he was looking for, a 5.5 litre V8 with 388 hp and 530 NM of torque. This was transplanted into the B-Class together with a seven-speed automatic transmission and the engine control unit.

The V8 power unit fitted amazingly well, and the team was even able to use the original engine mounts. The ECU also proved to be quite a headache, as it had to be reprogrammed only to process signals from the driven rear axle, and there were serious problems with the steering, but a number of modifications cleared that hurdle.

Going with rear-wheel drive meant getting a suitable rear drive axle, and it emerged that the rear axle of an older W 210 series E-Class would be a very good geometrical fit. Wurz and his colleagues designed a subframe, and extensive forming and welding work allowed the bodyshell to receive the new rear axle. The propshaft of the E-Class also fitted into the B-Class with no further modifications, elegantly concealed within the sandwich floor.

The exhaust system was a clever combination of various replacement part items, and took the form of a twin-pipe system emerging at the centre of the rear end. For the brakes, the team also found the right stuff in the replacement parts catalogue, in the form of the C32 AMG’s system.

As for wheels, the B 55 sits on five spoke design 18-inch AMG sports wheels with 235/40 front and 255/35 rear rubbbers – the maximum steering angle at the front axle was limited to suit. The team also replaced the suspension, installing a K&W coilover system.

For the interior, friends from the training workshop at the Sindelfingen plant provided Alcantara linings for the A, B and C-pillars as well as a roof liner in the same, luxurious material. The seats in a leather/Alcantara combination were fitted by Johnson Controls specialists located on-site in Rastatt. The plant’s paint shop provided the finishing touches – the white car has dark-painted radiator louvres and smoked headlamp lenses, offering very little indication of the demon concealed beneath the car’s bonnet.

At 1,620 kg, the weight of the B 55 is only around 180 kg heavier than the original car, and while no measurements have been taken yet, the Rastatt team feels that the car should manage a 0-100 kph sprint time of under six seconds.

Gallery after the jump.
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The W204 Mercedes-Benz C-Class facelift comes right on schedule, roughly mid-way through its typical 7 year lifecycle that started in early 2007. Visitors to the 2011 Detroit Auto Show next year will be able to catch the new W204 facelift for the first time in metal at the show grounds but for the rest of us, these photos will have to be suffice until Mercedes-Benz Malaysia launches the update.

The front end features an updated design including restyled headlamps, hood, and bumpers. The front end looks quite aggressive especially in the darker colours as a large amount of the front bumper has been dedicated to air intake grilles, which seem bigger vertically now as well.

The headlamps are not merely changes on the internal design – the whole shape is different and they’re now an L shape similar to those found on the SL-Class. Revisions on the tail end are not as drastic as before, but the tail lamps do get a new design and LED illumination to match the LED daytime running lights up front.

Top: new interior, Bottom: pre-facelift interior

The interior is completely different – the new C-Class gets a new dashboard that mimics that found in the W212 E-Class. The area that contains the COMAND screen now appears as an extension of the instrument cluster area, which is a very big change from the previous COMAND screen hidden behind an opening.

The multi-info display screen in the middle of the speedo is now of a higher resolution and features colour. Various buttons have also been rearranged and I’m liking the look of the new interior so far from the photos at least, much better than the pre-facelift.

There’s also much more area on the dash that Mercedes-Benz has now dedicated to showing off trim pieces, compared to the pre-facelift design which was quite bare especially in front of the passenger seat.

Look after the jump for a full hi-res gallery of the W204 facelift.
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For the first time in 60 years since the history of the flagship Mercedes-Benz S-Class, it will be available with a 4-cylinder engine. The first ever 4-cylinder S-Class model will be the Mercedes-Benz S250 CDI, using their new 2.2 litre twin-turbocharged diesel engine making 204 horsepower and 500Nm of torque. That’s probably more than enough torque to move the large luxo-barge around – it’s definitely more than the petrol-powered baseline S300 that’s sold here in Malaysia.

There are currently no Mercedes-Benz diesels officially on sale in Malaysia, and I think the new “250 CDI” engine is officially incompatible with our Euro 2M diesel fuel, since the C250 CDI test unit that was available only to selected media to drive earlier in the year used fuel that was specially imported from overseas.

The S250 CDI will also get auto stop-start technology, and combined with the turbodiesel engine it is rated to achieve a combined fuel consumption of 5.7 litres per 100km and output CO2 of 149g/km, which Mercedes-Benz claims is the first vehicle in its class to be able to hit CO2 emissions of lower than 150g/km. 0 to 100km/h is reached in 8.2 seconds.

And what are the company’s rivals doing? BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer said there are no plans at the moment for a 4-cylinder 7-Series, even saying at last month’s Paris 2010 show that he likes selling 7-Series with 6 and 8 cylinder engines. BMW plans to offer “electrification” of the existing 6 cylinder and 8 cylinder engines instead, which probably means some kind of hybrid solution.

Audi does have a 4-cylinder A8 in the plans but it involves a gasoline engine (probably Volkswagen Group’s widely used 2.0 TSI engine) instead of Mercedes-Benz’s turbodiesel approach.