As with any Mercedes, checking all the option boxes jacks the base price up significantly. Be a little more careful with options and you can get into the B200T for significantly less. Configuring one the way I'd buy it comes out to $40,700 or right on top of a well-equipped A3. However, the looks of the B200 would be an issue for me -- I'd have to choose the A3.
I must say folks, me my wife went out to buy an A3 and learned full and well that vw's and audis and porches are sold in magazine and newspapers and ads, fore the sales reps were almost all useless, with the exception of a large urban dealer in downtown toronto that offered all 3 brands in one show room.
so basically we were literally talked out of them so we we're disapointedly drving home from the last dealer sales morons we spoke to and for fun, we popped into a benz dealer thought hey lets have some fun driving a 6 figure test drive..
and low and behold, wow what the heck is this thing? a baby benz? so we took one for the weekend. left behind our diesel bug and WOW! were we sold, it is such a friken yuppy car it is not funny, my wife and I run an AD agency and THANK GOD we got a BENZ instead of a vw on roids (the A3 felt like a bigger heavier faster diesel bug when we tested a turbo even!) cause having a that magic tristar helps with the bidness when you roll..
at any rate, it's been a fantastic ride and my wife with sever scoliosis is able to be the CEO of her growing agency (i am just the founder guy now)
so at barely poking into our 3o's we got a BENZ that has been for both of us and many of our friends the nicest car any of them have ever driven.
oh and CVT reliability, seems ok, just one thing, the car gets Hyper, it has this auto adjusting to driving session fuzzy logic to the computer (spoken to MB bout it) and if you drive kinda aggressively and get off the hwy and want to drive like miss daisy keep your foot over the brake pedal for the benz gets a little hyper, (audi 5000's anyone?... not quite but if an old lady got caught she'd be scewed this puppy will lunge 10 feet in a second when cruising for a parking spot @ 5k. after pulling off the hwy flipping the CVT all over the place..)