MERCEDES HANDBRAKE!!

What isit about the Mercedes handbrake that is makes it so difficult?

I only ask, because I know that when Bill, my brother-in-law, has driven Charles's car he has described the handbrake as 'a pain in the arse' but we had a little incident last night that kind of reinforced that sentiment.

The merc has been left on the grass verge at the front of the house while Charles is away, leaving me plenty of space to get on and off the drive in the mini. When James arrived last night,he dcided to move his dad's car forward slightly, thus enabling him to leave his car behind it as we were travelling to Ford in my car. (With me so far?)

Although he literally moved in just about a metre, he came back in the house less than convinced that he'd managed to apply the handbrake, but as the verge is pretty flat we thought no more about it...

... until we returned and discovered that it had rolled back into Jim's Corsa! Admittedly it had done so very gently, and there was no damage at all to either car, but it left us feeling a bit uneasy about what would happen when James left for work,taking his own car of course and presumably leaving the Mercedes free to roll wherever it wanted.

We couldn't get Charles to respond to or calls, so we ended up ringing Bill, whose advice was to leave the thing in gear because trying to explain the workings of the wretched handbrake was going to be too complicated!!

So this is what we've done, but it still begs the question - Why design a handbrake that nobody can use effectively eh?