Recently, I had some brake noise in my Pathfinder and needed to get a rental car to go to Pennsylvania. Note that the Pathfinder has 108,000 miles and has needed NOTHING but regular front brakes every 54,000 miles and oil changes (MOBIL1 Synthetic) every 5000 and tires.

I was excited about the Chrysler 300. I had heard very good things about it. Even though it is probably technically outside of my companies reimbursement policy, what the heck, sometimes you gotta just splurge. I got in the car, a 6 cylinder with the cloth interior. The black cloth is actually quite nice, I find the rest of the interior materials the same as the more expensive versions of the car I've seen. What that means is, there is too much plastic and it's a bit cheap, but I find that's the way of almost all American cars with the possible exception of Ford.

I actually like the regular steering wheel better than the fake tortoise shell.

Getting in the car what you notice is that there is more light in a coffin. In search of style, we've got high doors, short windows and a VERY small windows. I went to put my elbow on the door sill. I'm 6'1 with 35 inch arms and tend to drive with my arms on top of the doors when the glass meets rather than the arm rest. I reached, and reached, and reached. I decided that the doors in this car are so high, that I'm relegated to the door rest, which are actually relatively high and comfortable. I certainly feel safe in this car. In most cars, even my Pathfinder, my upper body is exposed and I'm sitting amost behind the center pillar. In this car, I'm where I'm supposed to be, and I think that thy only thing not covered by steel is from my nose to the top of my head.

OK, the real star of this car is the way it moves. I didn't discover the brake noise until the morning so I was LATE for my meeting. This car HUSTLED. Lets just say that if I drove it every day, my license would be in trouble. Not only does it hustle down the highway (at the speed limit of course) it's a on-ramp, off-ramp and country road bomber. The Goodyear tires handle well what you'd expect to do in a car this big, and the suspension WORKS! My wife had a Mercedes E320 (the previous style) and that car was more luxury than floaty. While this car has input from now parent Mercedes, the sporty, sporty, sporty nature of this car made me feel that Mercedes has been recruiting chassis engineers from the best over at BMW.

The surprise was that the V6 did not dissapoint. I thought it would with both a Hemi and a hopped up (SRT) Hemi to move up to, but this motor actually pushed the car along well.

Of course I always have some issue with American cars. They are fine to rent, but have they fixed their dependability gremlins compared to the Japanese (refer back to the 2001 108k Nissan, love that car) or even the Germans? Does this car's German heritage give it some quality advantage? It certainly seems it's come through in the quality of the motor, the interior and the suspension, but note not in the interior plastics.