Kia Cerato vs Mercedes-Benz C220

What's the difference?

Three years after the fourth-generation Cerato small car rolled into Australian dealerships, Kia launched a mid-life facelift for the sedan and hatch range in mid-2021.

It ushered in styling tweaks including new headlights and Kia’s new logo, as well as more safety tech and a multimedia upgrade.

At the top of the range sits the warmed-up Cerato GT. It’s not quite Hyundai i30 N-level performance, more i30 N-Line. In other words, more than enough performance to keep most people satisfied and enough poke to get away quickly at the lights.

But is the updated version of Kia’s Cerato trying to be something it’s not, or is it a performance bargain?

Read on to find out.

Do you know how many bones you have in your body? Stop counting, there are 207. And if say half those bones were replaced with different ones would you consider yourself to still be the same? Well that’s what Benz has done with the new C-Class – sort of. Of the roughly 13,000 parts which make up a C-Class car, 6500 of them have been modified or changed.

You don’t need to know every change to the new C-Class, but at the end of this review you will be across the differences that you can see, feel and hear.

Just a note before we start. The top-of-the-range Mercedes-AMG C63 S arrives in early 2019 and wasn’t available to drive at the Australian C-Class launch. That’s why we’ll focus on the other grades here - the C 200, C 220 d, C 300 and C 43. We’ll test drive and review the Australian C 63 S when it arrives – promise.