$315 in Software Made Our Mercedes Cooler and Safer

Every Mercedes-Benz is stacked to the rafters with technology, much of which now falls into a category the company calls “Digital Extras.” Essentially, Digital Extras are features that can be toggled, customized, and/or purchased—yes, purchased—in-car or over the air using the Mercedes app. Here’s what that all means for the current-generation Mercedes-Benz E-Class, a tech leader among Benz’s luxury cars, as experienced via our yearlong E450 All-Terrain wagon test car.

The Freebies

The things you can already control for free are myriad, basically a laundry list of remote features available across various vehicles in the autosphere but all bundled here. Naturally, you can manipulate these Digital Extras via the car’s touchscreen, but there’s something very cool about using Mercedes’ slick mobile app to make a change and then finding it active (or deactivated) the next time you hop behind the wheel.

The features are bundled under Comfort (10 items), Infotainment (10), Safety and Service (12), and Navigation (11).

Comfort items include geofencing, remote start and unlock, phone as key, online voice control (it uses the internet if you ask it stuff), live tips for maximizing your vehicle’s potential, and more. Under Infotainment, you can set things like preferred news channels, activate games, turn the car’s search bar into a global search to ask it questions or find a function, and get personalized weather, among other items.

Safety and Service is where you set privacy settings for your data, activate remote diagnostics and software updates, turn on vehicle tracking, get notifications, and have the car warn you if it detects parts that need replacing. Navigation is where you customize the navigation experience to show you available parking spaces, update the maps, opt in to share navigation routes, turn on the vehicle locator, enable car-to-X communication, and more. In all, there are 43 features to manipulate that fall under Digital Extras.

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The Ones That Cost Money

And then there are a couple that cost money. (This also presumes you’re already paying the $15 per month or $150 annually to enable Mercedes-Benz Connect, which is required for any Digital Extras, even those you’ve paid to permanently activate.) There are currently two items that you need to pay to access in our E-Class, and we purchased both. Are they worth it?

Dashcam: $200 for permanent activation

This turns your forward-facing camera into a dashcam to record your trips or any incidents you might encounter. It does not record sound, and it isn’t high-res enough to, say, read license plates that aren’t fairly close. It can be set to start recording every time you start the car and then store the clips on a USB-C storage device plugged into the car; we’re using a 1TB flash drive. When the drive is full, the oldest footage is deleted.

(We’re interested to see if the flash drive survives the Mercedes, as video takes up a lot of storage space and we did not buy a unit specifically meant to be written over constantly.)

The dashcam also saves photos and video and locks them from being overwritten if the car detects a collision, which would have come in quite handy recently when we were driving a different E-Class that was hit in the front end while parked. We weren’t near the car, and it did not have the dashcam feature activated. We wish it had the cam for additional peace of mind and evidence of what happened. Luckily, the offending driver located us and admitted responsibility.

Is it worth it? If you’re the type of person who dreads the idea of having cords running everywhere or wiring (or paying someone to wire) the cords through your dashboard, then it’s probably for you, as a more full-featured dashcam is going to require going at least one of those routes.

But those dashcams—many of which come with front, rear, and interior cameras—usually offer better resolution and software such as license plate enhancement in this same price range before installation. And we have to mention Tesla Sentry mode, which records incidents in a 360-degree field around the vehicle for free. (A separate $10 monthly or $100 annual subscription is required for live views, which the Mercedes cannot do at any price.)

Were it our car, we’d have a separate cam, as the Mercedes unit is limited strictly to what’s in front of you and it lacks sound recording, but there’s no denying the simplicity of getting this one set up. And it’s a good investment if you think it’s going to be a while—or never—before you install a cam of your own, just to have some peace of mind in the case of an incident like we experienced in that other Mercedes.

Mercedes also touts the dashcam as a way to record videos of road trips and scenic views, but a phone on a mount or in the hand of a helpful passenger can accomplish the same thing.

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Digital Light with Projection Function: $5/month, $35/year, $110/permanent

This function builds on the optional Digital Light headlamps ($990) and attempts to make your car cooler and safer at the same time.

As for safer, it does that a couple of ways. First, it activates a feature that spotlights pedestrians, highlighting the person and the direction they’re moving but without blinding them, which is thoughtful. (The Digital Light headlamps already have a “multibeam LED” feature that dims certain areas of your high-beams to avoid shining them on oncoming traffic.)

This also adds two animations for the lights upon walking up to or locking the car, including one called “star wave” and the one we have active, “digital rain.” That last one isn’t Tay Zonday’s comeback banger; it’s the car’s lights activating individual LEDs at various brightness levels to move pixelated streaks of “rain” down a flat surface. It obviously works whether you’re in front of a wall or not, but it doesn’t look nearly as impressive scattering on, say, a pine tree. Without this feature, the headlamps just move up and down when activated. Lame.

Lastly, and this is the coolest trick, the car can project iconography on the road ahead using the lights, including arrows to indicate lane changes and navigation directions; warnings to indicate following distance; and symbols to indicate construction ahead, a bicycle or car in your blind spot, and more. Unfortunately, most of this doesn’t work yet in the U.S., but I have seen faint arrows to indicate lane changes.

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Is it worth it? I mean, you’re already spending $75,000 or more on a Mercedes, what’s another $115? However, strictly speaking, this isn’t worth the money for Americans. The welcome/goodbye animations are fun, and we of course support the idea of making pedestrians safer, but without the other features, you’re not getting enough for your money.

We don’t blame Mercedes, though; we blame the U.S. government and its ancient lighting rules. While the matrix high-beams are now legal, the more advanced projections remain locked up behind a software wall. But hey, if we drive our E-Class to somewhere such lights are legal, the car will recognize its location and enable them. Now I just need to figure out how to drive to Europe.

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

• Intro: We’re Testing a Mercedes Wagon For a Year​
• What We Love and Loathe So Far