What We Love and Loathe About Our Yearlong Test Mercedes-Benz Wagon

We’re a few months into our long-term test of a Mercedes-Benz E450 All-Terrain station wagon, passing enough time and miles behind the wheel to form some hardened opinions about the car’s finer points. Here’s what we’ve loved and loathed so far.

Love: The Cushy Ride

The E-Class rides like a pillow coated in marshmallow fluff that's floating on a sea of kitten whispers. OK, maybe it’s not quite that good, but there’s no doubt the E450 All-Terrain rides spectacularly no matter what you’re asking it to do. And it’s even better than the regular sedan—which is no easy feat—thanks to the slightly softer suspension and raised ride height that work on behalf of its off-road pretensions.

Loathe: The G*****n Satellite Radio Tuning

OK, I get that there are presets. Those are fine. I even like the recommended satellite stations area, especially since our car’s SiriusXM subscription includes all the internet channels typically limited to the app or a web browser. But I also sometimes want to listen to things on stations that I don’t have saved to a preset, most of the time that being live sports.

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Listening to specific teams means finding a different satellite radio station pretty much every game, but even if you know the station number (not always a given), getting there is obtuse and difficult. The “live sports” options often don’t have every game displayed for some reason, and the only immediately obvious solution is to swipe or tap arrows through each station individually. (Plus, the icon that gets you to station lists delivers totally different experiences depending on where you enter from. It’s absurd.) This is problematic while driving and listening to, say, channel 35 but wanting to hop to 392. Plus, search doesn’t seem to work with the team name, only the station name, and voice commands fail miserably when trying to find a specific game.

Too many manufacturers either hide a simple keypad for entering the numbers or don’t offer one at all. Please fix this, Mercedes, and make it a top-level function. And while you’re at it, maybe passively download the song/program data so it can display as you’re scrolling through the stations. Audi solved that issue more than a decade ago.

Love: Recommended/Fast-Favorite Buttons

Here’s something I really like about the MBUX system: Your frequently used apps and functions (radio, seat massage, whatever) appear at the bottom of the screen automatically and stay there until the car decides some other feature is more urgently needed or appropriate for the situation. These sometimes drop off if you’ve just accessed the function, as well.

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Loathe: Service Pricing

I was spoiled—or more accurately, my corporate expense account was spoiled—by the last car I chaperoned, a Ford Maverick hybrid. We had just one required service on that inexpensive trucklet over two years, and it came in under 160 bucks. We took the Benz in for a scheduled checkup and paid $459.02. It was $200 just to get in the door, $20 for a drain plug, and $77 for wiper blades I didn’t need.

The wipers were mentioned as if they were included in the service—“We’re also going to replace your wipers today”—so I thought, sure, why not? But not only did they cost extra, the wipers now squeak and chop across the glass. They didn’t before. Pro tip: Only get new blades if you absolutely need them.

So, yeah, it’s pricey, but I guess what would you expect when you receive narrated video walkarounds detailing your car’s vital signs and needs while you’re in the dealership waiting room?

Love: The High Resolution and Digital Extras

The screens are gloriously high-res, which, besides being awesome, makes reading information a lot easier, and it also enables them to display fun things including specific graphical touches for holidays and various seasons. (And, yes, HD video for passengers that will never use that ability. See next entry.) During Halloween, for example, leaves piled up near the icons, and the passenger screen showed off a trio of adorable jack-o’-lanterns. Now, during the holiday season, a Santa hat is overlaid on our user profile image, and snow blankets many of the menus and buttons.

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The car also featured Sound Drive as a media option. This is a function developed with musician will.i.am that alters a curated selection of songs based on acceleration, braking, and steering inputs. While our own Eric Tingwall was summarily impressed when he tried it out at CES 2024, the song chosen for his demo—the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”—wasn’t available in our car. There were a couple of artists we’d heard of in the roster of songs that work with Sound Drive, but no big stars beyond will.i.am himself. On top of that, we couldn’t get Sound Drive to make a noticeable difference in regular driving beyond it getting really quiet when you come to a stop. As for “remixing” the songs, we could only encourage the occasional (and not particularly well integrated) flute-ish sound during 90-degree turns and heavy bass when we drove in circles. It was a lot cooler in theory than in practice, which may be why Mercedes discontinued the software and deleted it from our car starting December 17.

Loathe: The Passenger Dash Screen

These sorts of displays are not exclusive to Mercedes’ vehicles, and I don’t understand why they exist or who would use one. Tech-curious adults have poked at the Benz’s screen a few times in bemusement but otherwise left it alone, while teenagers disregard it completely in favor of their own devices. I understand multifunctional rear displays that show things like navigation and allow control of vehicle functions—the front screen is far away—but this screen is literally right next to the main one. And using its big selling point, the ability to watch movies and video (it cannot be viewed from the driver’s angle), just means whoever’s in the front passenger seat is completely ignoring the driver. Rude.

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Love: The Ambient Lighting

Like all Mercedes, our Benz has really rad ambient lights that not only are customizable within practically the entire color spectrum, but they react to various functions, too. These include glowing red or blue depending on whether you turn the temperature up or down, and flashing red on the side of the car where danger is detected, whether that’s an approaching car or you getting too close to a lane line. Yes, you can turn this off and the lights aren’t particularly special on their own, but the implementation combines with so much about the E450 to simply make it feel special. We’re partial to the pink and teal Miami Rose color theme—Crockett and Tubbs would love it.

Loathe: The Asking Price

It’s a Mercedes. Of course it’s expensive. (See the service pricing above.) But that doesn’t mean we can’t complain about it. You can’t get into an E450 All-Terrain for less than $79,550, and our car has a further fifteen large in options on it. Those include $200 for the Night package (blacked-out trim), $850 for 1-inch-larger 20-inch AMG wheels, $300 for more USB-C ports, and a few other small items. The big-ticket stuff includes $1,500 for the giant, dash-spanning Superscreen—we’ve already commented on how useful (or not) it’s been—$1,950 for the Driver Assist pack, $2,550 for the Pinnacle spec (fancier trimmings), $2,950 for multicontour seats, and $2,990 for fancy leather.

Is that stuff all worth it? We’ll dive back into that in a future update, but it’s listed here to illustrate how dearly you pay to drive something with a three-pointed star on the front, at least for certain items.

Love: Inline Six-Cylinder Engine

Inline-sixes are inherently silky smooth—there’s a reason BMW has stuck with ’em for so long. But Toyota has been known to use them, as well, and they were a key arrow in Mercedes’ gas-burning quiver for decades until the company shifted to V-6s in the late 1990s. But Mercedes went back to straight-sixes in 2017 with the introduction of the M256 as found in our All-Terrain.

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It displaces 3.0 liters, and thanks to a turbocharger, it makes a healthy 375 horsepower and 369 lb-ft of torque. As noted in our arrival story, it’s really quick at the test track—4.4 seconds to 60—but that speed also translates well to everyday life. The power delivery and accelerator response are tuned superbly, such that a dart across traffic to make a left turn is smooth and rapid, not jerky and scary.

We’ve even managed to cross the 27-mpg combined mark, not too shabby considering how much we love winding out this engine.

Loathe: The Voice Assistant’s Janky Voice

This isn’t a dealbreaker, but she sounds robotic and choppy, a complete disconnect from other assistant voices you might hear in your life, such as Siri or Alexa.

And she’s not the best listener, either, as the commands could use some work. A recent conversation: “Hey, Mercedes, turn on my seat heater to high.” “I couldn’t understand you. Can you repeat that?” “Hey, Mercedes, turn my seat heater to level three.” “I couldn’t understand you. Can you repeat that?” “Hey, Mercedes, turn my seat heater to three.” “OK! Happy to do it. Turning your seat heater to level three.” Didn’t I say exactly that? Ridiculous.

More on Our Long-Term Mercedes-Benz E450 All-Terrain:

• We’re Testing a Mercedes Wagon for a Year