The ‘Mercedes-Test’

Upper-middles who pass the Mondeo-test – those who are merely mildly amused by your suggestion that they might drive a Mondeo – may still reveal hidden class anxieties over the Mercedes. When you’ve had your complacent little chuckle about Mondeos, try saying ‘Now, let me guess . . . I’d say you probably drive a big Mercedes.’

If your subject looks hurt or annoyed, and responds either tetchily, with a forced laugh, or with a scornful comment about ‘rich trash’ or ‘wealthy businessmen’, you have hit the adjacent-class insecurity button. Your subject has made it into the upper-middle ‘intelligentsia’, ‘professional’ or ‘country’ set, and is anxious to distinguish himself from the despised middle-middle ‘business’ class, with which he almost certainly has some family connections. You will find that his father (or even grandfather – these prejudices are passed down the generations) was a petit-bourgeois middle-class businessman of some sort – perhaps a successful shopkeeper or sales manager or even a well-off car dealer – who sent his children to smart public schools where they learnt to look down on petit-bourgeois middle-class businessmen.

Many English people will tell you that there is no longer any Jane-Austenish stigma attached to being ‘in trade’. They are mistaken. And it is not just the tiny minority of aristocrats and landed gentry who turn up their noses at the commercial world. Upper-middle class people in ‘respectable’ professions, such as barristers, doctors, civil servants and senior army officers, can often be equally snooty – and the upper-middle chattering classes (with their ‘nice-work’ careers in the media, the arts, academia, publishing, charities, think-tanks and so on) are the most disparaging of all. Very few of these people will drive a Mercedes, and most will regard the Mercedes-driving classes with at least some degree of disfavour, but only the insecure will get all huffy and heated and scornful at the thought of being associated with such a vulgar, business-class vehicle.

Again, the price of the car is not really the issue here. Mercedes-despisers may drive either equally expensive, more expensive or much cheaper cars than the Mercedes they find so abhorrent. Nor is wealth per se the problem. Upper-middle Mercedes-despisers come in all income brackets: they may make as much money as the ‘vulgar rich businessman’ driving the ‘Merc’ (as he would call it), or even more, or much less. The class issue concerns the means by which one acquires one’s wealth, and how one chooses to display it. A Mercedes-despising barrister or publisher might well drive a top-of-the-range Audi, which costs about the same as a big Mercedes, but is regarded as more elegantly understated.

At the moment, BMWs are tainted, to some extent, with the same business-class image as the Mercedes, although generally associated with a younger, City-dealer, ‘yuppie’ stereotype. Jaguars have also suffered a bit from a vulgar ‘trade’ connection, being associated with wealthy used-car dealers, slum-landlords, bookmakers and shady-underworld characters. But Jaguars are also the official cars of government ministers, which to some lends them an air of respectability – although others feel that this only confirms their inherent sleaziness. In both cases, however, these associations may be fading, and I did not find either of these cars reliable as a class-anxiety indicator. Should you wish to replicate my highly scientific class-anxiety experiments – or if you just fancy tormenting some socially insecure upper-middles – use the Mercedes test.