Not all the tuning houses offering aftermarket upgrades for European luxury cars are in Germany. Misha Designs, for instance, is based in Los Angeles, California and this, sports fans, is their take on sportier-than-thou Mercedes-Benz C-Class.
Misha acknowledge openly that their new body kit draws inspiration from AMG's Black Series, but it's been engineered to fit any C-Class sedan or coupé from 2008 to the present, including the C63 AMG.
But this is California, dude, so there are no engine, suspensions or performance modifications; the changes are the purely cosmetic.
But they are, it must be said, pretty radical, starting at a deep-chested front airdam with three huge air intakes and a ground-hugging splitter.
A special 'air-channeling' bonnet gives the Merc that authentic muscle-car look while, in theory anyway, also sucking hot air out of the engine compartment.
DEEP CONCAVE RIMS
New front and rear wings with matching skirts give the car a wider stance and provide space for Misha's own cast-alloy rims, 19” deep concave, 14-spoked designs in gloss black, wearing 235/35 rubber in front and beefy 275/30's at the rear.
Trailing-edge slots in the front wings and rear bumper (which can be ordered with a optional carbon-fibre diffuser) draw hot air away from the brakes, and the kit cones with not one but two spoilers - a roof spoiler very similar to the one on a standard Ford Fiesta hatch, and a new boot lid with a very neat moulded-in lip spoiler.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of the kit, however is that, with the exception of the rear wheel-arch flares, everything bolts straight on to the existing mountings for the original body parts, so there's very little 'wet work' to do - and the whole kit costs less than $10 000 (R90 000), not including fitting and paint.
The C-Class coupé you see here has a Misha Designs body kit installed and sprayed by RDB Customisation Centre in Los Angeles.