A means it's No 1! (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

A means it's No 1!

NEW REG FEATURE: THE Mercedes-Benz A-Class has scored the best result in its class for the European New Car Assessment Programme and has been awarded five stars.

The A-class also excelled in child protection achieving an outstanding four-star rating.

With this excellent result, the patented sandwich-floor safety concept of the A-Class has now also proved its effectiveness in this rating test. In a severe frontal impact, this design causes the engine and transmission to slide downwards and out of the way, rather than being pushed into the car's interior.

This means that a larger front crumple zone is available than on other cars in its category.

In addition, the sandwich design is also advantageous in the event of a side impact because the occupants sit higher up than in a conventional compact car.

The occupant safety package is rounded off by adaptive front airbags which reploy in two stages, depending on the severity of the accident, plus newly developed head/thorax bags.

The latter help to protect both the head and upper torso of those in the front seats in the event of a lateral collision.

A belt status indicator in the instrument cluster tells the driver if the occupants are wearing their seat belts or not.

First launched in 1997, the Mercedes-Benz A Class was a unique offering and the first car to feature a sandwich-floor concept and over 1.1 million first generation A-class were sold worldwide, of which 88,372 were in the UK.

The latest five-star A-Class was launched in 2004 and developed the sandwich-floor concept even further which created a new ultra-safe three-door, to sit alongside the popular five-door version.