Earlier this year, Mercedes-Benz pulled the curtain back on Metris, a new mid-size cargo van which aims at commercial segments needing something smaller than the company’s flagship Sprinter.
This week, CCJ was able to take a pre-production 2016 Metris for a road tour in and around the mountain ranges near Telluride, Col.
Walking up to the vehicle, very little of the exterior is surprising. Last year, sales of Euro-style vans – a hallmark of Mercedes – surpassed sales of traditional style vans for the first time in history. Now that every major OEM has featured Euro-styling in recent releases, that’s a trend not likely to reverse any time soon.
Most noticeable are some of the interior elements the 2016 Metris borrowed from Mercedes’ C-Class, like the instrument cluster and a blinker-like, column-mounted gear shifter switch.
Sprinter’s bulbous dash-mounted shifter didn’t make the cut in Metris, where gear shifting feels more like setting cruise control or switching on the windshield wipers.
The commercial van is also not short on guilty pleasures like independent climate control for both passenger and driver and a dash mounted navigation screen.
