Designed to both take sales in the Range Rover and also to provide buyers of Mercedes-Benz cars having a more urbane option to the industrially-packaged Mercedes-Benz G-Class beloved of lumberjacks and Austrian hill farmers, the M-Class has carved a neat swathe with the market.

Wherever the monied classes take their kids to school is going to be found flocks of those cars – that is something of the shame, because even though it rarely gets removed road, the equipment is eminently able to plugging the mud using the best of them, yet will even deliver consistently comfortable on-road performance.

Regardless of the appeal of the big-engined variants, the ML320 has become the best buy, supplying the ideal mixture of a torque engine and sensible amounts of economy. Lifelong ownership costs will also be better than may be expected.