Cruising in the Wild

The Mercedes-Benz GLC 300 negotiates highway traffic and prisTine corbett wilderness with equal ease and panache.

- Sumeet Keswani

There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as treading the raw terrain of Corbett National Park, the most beautiful forest in the country, in search of its magnificent wildlife. The early morning breeze that hits you in the face with its damp jungle aroma, rays that insist on peeking through the dense canopy and casting tiny pools of sunlight on the rugged forest floor, and a lingering sense of a big cat presence round every corner—it’s every bit a nature lover’s dream. How about doing it in a luxury SUV? That’s exactly the test we decided to put the Mercedes-Benz GLC 300 4MATIC through. But first, we had to get there.

The drive from Delhi to Corbett is over 260km of featureless roadway. A crossover between its GL-category SUVs and the C-Class sedans, the Mercedes- Benz GLC 300 had to deal with both extremes on the way— silken smooth national highways and small-town roads with potholes the size of lunar craters. The five dynamic drive modes of the car made a huge difference. Each mode comes with its own setting of the engine, transmission, steering and suspension. Now, I have always driven a manual transmission on Indian roads so I am a bit of a control freak. Driving a nine-speed automatic over six hours took away my job of switching gears and gave me a terrible itch to control something else about the car. (Although there is a paddle switch available, just in case.) Hence, I kept switching between the modes whenever the road transformed drastically.