The current Mercedes-Benz GLB is an underrated little thing. Here’s a properly small crossover you can get with a third row that offers better passenger space than a Mitsubishi Outlander, fun turbo noises, and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. However, it’s also about due for a replacement, and Mercedes-Benz just teased it. While the full crossover hasn’t been revealed, Mercedes has given us plenty to talk about.
The new GLB seems like it’s going to get a controversial CLA-style front end, but we’re not going to talk about that. Partly because the exterior teaser photo shows the car absolutely covered in snow, so it’s hard to judge the styling accurately. Partly because there’s some absolute nonsense going on inside the new GLB that we need to discuss. It’s not the passenger screen, although that’s a solid contender for the most useless new gadget, considering passengers already have phones. Nope, it’s the ambient lighting treatment.
Looking back, it’s not hard to remember a time when ambient lighting was subtle. It might’ve been a tiny bulb or two illuminating the ignition switch so you knew where to stick the key in, or a lighted shift pattern serving up a subtle glow. This eventually evolved into little lights in the cup holders so transparent water bottles would glow, and the meanest of footwell-illuminating color-changing lights tucked way out of your field of view. Now, however, ambient lighting is everywhere, and Mercedes-Benz is employing it to a distracting level.
Earlier this year, I drove the Mercedes-AMG E 53 Hybrid 4MATIC+ Sedan, which is a mouthful but also a pretty good car. It’s astoundingly good on gas, it’s hilariously quick, it offers real plug-in range, but it also nearly blinded me. See, it has a strip of ambient lighting running across the top of the dashboard with output equivalent to a collapsed sun. Not a huge problem during the day, but at night, in the rain, on a dimly-lit controlled-access highway, it meant that I could barely see the road past the glow of ambience. Limping the thing to the next exit so I could pull over, dig through the infotainment, and turn down the ambient lighting was one of the sketchiest things I’ve done in a car. Considering I once removed the hood of an overheating Ford Crown Victoria and threw water on the actual engine every half-mile or so to limp it home, that’s saying a lot.
With the GLB being a less expensive model than the E-Class, you’d expect Mercedes-Benz to tone down the ambient lighting. Well, that’s not quite what’s happened here. Sure, from this angle, there doesn’t appear to be a huge strip of it atop the dashboard, but instead something with big glare potential is on display. That’s right, someone decided to put a bucketload of illuminated three-pointed stars in the moonroof, as if shining multicolor lighting from above and brightening up the cabin won’t make the road appear darker.
Why illuminate a panoramic moonroof, a thing that already has stars in it at night if you look up, regardless of vehicle make? You can blame BMW for originating this trend with its Panoramic SkyLounge illuminated moonroof, but at least the lighting on that is fairly dim. On the new GLB, the glow is bright even against the relative brightness of a cold-weather testing chamber. Oh, and that’s before we get into the rings around the vents and the lighting on the door cards and lower dashboard.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a bit of mood lighting in a bar or an apartment or what have you, but this seems excessive for something that’ll be travelling down the road at 70 MPH. On the bright side, you should be able to turn it off, or hopefully just avoid speccing the illuminated moonroof altogether. Someone definitely wants this, but, um, why?
Top graphic image: Mercedes-Benz
“Someone definitely wants this, but, um, why?”
Because Molly was.at the club and needs a ride home.
I’m not going to make any generalizations about the type of person who finds this appealing. However, I will say that it is unlikely that I would have much in common with an individual who purchases this vehicle and lighting package.
GOOD LORD. This just continues Mercedes-Benz’s interior design devolution into becoming an even worse hookah-lounge in that part of Astoria where there are no women on the street at night.
Also, tremendous headline! Night Panel was the best Saab feature and I would you that all the time on night time drives – visibility was unbeatable. Most car screens are horribly bright to the point of killing your ability to see. The gauge cluster in my ATS-V can only get so dim, but at least it has the great HUD so I can ignore the rest. My parent’s have some newer Volvos that are just awful at this. My wife’s Model 3 has a screen but no other distracting light, and the dark mode on that screen actually works great for not being too overly bright and distracting.
It’s bad enough the Ginza-by-Night/Karaoke Bar interior.
But why did Mercedes give it’s baby SUV an Audi front end?
I’m glad I’m not the only one who got a flash of Audi looking at that.
Seems like the old luxury guys can’t stop chasing “new money”. At this point all they are is tacky, soon to fail tech on wheels. It’s gross, hopefully they change course.
The new money/conspicuous consumption/brainrot crowd aren’t even going to be consistent customers either. Sure, you can lure them in with a lease on a giant rolling screen that can take pictures and post directly to Tik Tok or whatever but their attention spans are too short and now that all these products are basically giant phones and on the same development cycles as them something better will be out within a year or two and they’ll move on to whatever is making the rounds on Instagram that day.
Then the Mercedes or BMW dealer or whatever will be stuck with a car they charged a $100,000 MSRP for that’s now worth $40,000 coming off a lease that they’ve gotten $999 a month for for the last two years. It’s a terrible business strategy, but end stage capitalist corporate world is only about the next earnings call and line must go up or heads will roll.
“sad but true”-metallica and Greg
They do realize people need to see at night, right? Oh wait, brohan will flip on the high beams and not turn them off. Problem solved! /s
Mood light, ambient light, interior light should generally only be enabled when the car is stationary.
Dedicated, well focused, map lights for passengers are okay, and low level red light in the passenger footwells as well.
Do any current manufacturers do night mode as Saab did?
To answer your last question – no
Mercedes Benz has run out of good design ideas cca 2010, maybe even earlier. The way they came up with the star logo pattern which they apply on anything from grilles to rims to headliner makes me want to pull out my Gucci-patterned handkerchief and dry my eyes.
Clearly their latest design philosophy has an audience but I am suggesting not everything the customer wants should actually be implemented. Blind people can’t complain about colors, ya know?
I hate to say this, but any color of light but amber and red should be banned from performance car interiors whether this is gauges, dials, buttons, etc. which are meant to be used while the car is in motion. Even in a 24 hour endurance race where you think the glare of the other cars unrestricted headlights are a huge problem, somehow blue and white gauges are a bigger deal in regard to ruining your night vision if you have to scan frequently.
Selective Yellow anyone? Actually, no. The article from Daniel Stern, has a good explanation. It’s to do with blue wavelength. To pull a quote “Blue, indigo, and violet are difficult for the human optical system to process correctly. They are the shortest visible wavelengths and tend to focus in front of our retina rather than upon it.” – Daniel Stern Lighting, Selective Yellow Light. Didn’t Torch write this up at some point?
Really?
Because the few times i’ve been on the bridge of a ship while underway, I do not recall seeing those colors – day or night.
There the displays have been awash in a largely blue-green glow from every screen and diode.
Perhaps red and amber are reserved for warning lights so they’ll stand out from across the room.
it’s giving the rio las vegas
Yuck in every way. This is more a full size Power Wheels with a huge budget than a car and appeals to the same brain age. Somehow, MB has become the Dollar Store Genesis. I’m really not a fan of the bright LEDs of everything today, especially in the white and blue spectrum, but they should at least be able to be easily turned down. My car has a readily accessible scroll wheel that does the gauges and center display. I almost never run the full nuclear fusion setting even in the daylight and the lowest setting is so dim as to be practically useless in all but the darkest, desolate places, which I think is the perfect range.
“On the bright side…”
I see what you did there.
Mercedes has become what a 10 year old thinks luxury looks like.
It’s like some horrid, overly-ambitious house I’d try to build in the Sims when I was like 8
Ugh gross. Night vision while driving is already being super messed up by screens, Merc gotta shove a few more and something extra in there too. Dumb.
I thought it’s impossible to lose track of the basics of human anatomy more than Ikea’s couch designers, but I have to say the fight is merciless on that hilltop.
And this time the Germans are not letting the Swedes remain neutral.
Not fair, the best couch I’ve ever bought was an Ikea one about 20 years ago and cost me about 1K then. In the last 7 years I’ve spent about 8K just trying to find one that is as comfortable yet manages to last at least 2 years instead of the 10-20 I was expecting.
Lovesac Sactional. My SO convinced me to spend the money on one. So comfortable people fall asleep on it. Also modular so one dog-chewed part doesn’t mean destroying the whole couch. Replace it and sac out.
Realizing “products have gone downhill hard since 20 years ago” is no longer about the 80s-90s and is now moving into the mid-late 00s.
I think the VAG and BMW Germans are ok. I wouldn’t mix them in with whatever MB is doing
I’m not sure if there’s a company that’s lost the plot more thoroughly than Mercedes….
Ah, the good ‘ol 2.0L turbo-4-popper C63.
Outside of the AMG models all I see is a bunch of tacky vehicles that will be the most expensive car at the Buy Here Pay Here lot in 6 years.
Even the AMGs aren’t safe. The C63 and GLC63 are powered by 4 cylinders. The base engine in the AMG GT is a 4 cylinder. The new AMG E53 is a PHEV monstrosity that weighs as much as a full sized body on frame truck….
That’s one of the things I love about my S4. Red gauges, red button illumination, red radio screen, faint red light cast on the center stack. It’s so considerate of my night vision.
There really should be a regulations limiting the color temp and lux inside a automotive cabin.
The original NSX had the all-red setup too and it was amazing. So purposeful.
I’d rather have a 3rd gen S-class.. sadly I’d also need a bankruptcy attorney.
I am literally begging for the return of the Saab “night panel” button
I had a similar dark dash button (pre-screens) on either my old Civic or my old Elantra, and used it a lot driving thru the mountains at night.
I use the infotainment screen kill button on my Wrangler any time it’s dark and raining hard and I have to concentrate.
I have ambient lighting on the current ride, and it is turned off. Why the hell do I need to see my feet?
Add just a bit of animation to that top image and I’ll think I’m Roger Wilco again.
This is the sad state of luxury German car brands nowadays: gimmicks galore. In the early days luxury meant overengineering, reliability and good materials.
Now behind all those massive screens and blinding lights is cost-cutting, critical failures and cheap, brittle plastic everywhere.
Manufacturers can get away with the UFO ambient lighting because 99% of people only drive on roads that have arguably too much illumination already, so you can’t even see your own headlights and therefore glare is not an issue. But like you said, I wonder how people who live in the middle of nowhere and no street lights manage to see anything out of a modern car that’s all screens inside.
I hate my BMW G30 digital cluster. Like any non-OLED panel, there’s backlight bleed so it’s never fully black and it’s incredibly distracting.
It’s because the Germans couldn’t (and still can’t) figure out China. Domestic Chinese cars have a lot of interior doodads and screens and whatnot, so the Germans think that’s all their own cars need to be competitive while completely ignoring the real reasons the Chinese domestics have succeeded.
Yup, this. The student ate its teacher.
I’ve been working in middle-of-nowhere VT in the dark lately and this is a real thing. Luckily I can easily dim the gauges and center display in my car and they get dim enough that it’s almost off and the center display can even be turned off completely while still running ACP. All cars should have similar capability. It would also be nice if the colors went back to the greens, reds, and ambers of the past. We get it, ooh, neato, cheap blue LEDs came to market, but that was over 20 years ago.
How did a look that was only popular with people that loved gravity bongs and worked in food service become the defining interior characteristic of Mercedes?
Easy. When a GLB has a lower starting price than a Toyota Highlander.
“You can afford the lease payment, Bro!”
Next thing you know, they’re rolling up to Arby’s in one of deez GLBeez.
That had not occurred to me. I guess it’s just a Nissan Rogue premium.
Incredible
Bruno Sacco is rolling in his grave.
Probably while forced to wear a suit that is shimmering in LED-backlit 3-pointed stars.
I just saw my first Mercedes EQS (I think) with the all over micro star pattern wheels. I still can’t believe they’re for real.
Oh boy.
Something for current CLA owners looking to upgrade to use 15-year auto loans on.
Who does all this mood lighting appeal to? Genuine question, as I’m really curious what the market is for this.
Yeah…I was next to an MB sedan last night, and the purple surround lighting in the interior was shockingly bright and encompassing. Seemed really distracting, and I was outside of it even.
The 23-year old fourth owner who bought it at a Buy Here, Pay Here lot.
Extroverts who scream laugh with their friends in public 4 feet away from your face and the demented weirdos that leave overhead lights on in their houses.
There has been a long standing trend with Asian tuners to add ambient lighting along with lighting under cars. As mentioned below – the Chinese market is really big on screens and electronics inside cars.
China is the largest car market in the world and the largest market for Mercedes. China alone is 37%. Asia is 45% of Mercedes sales. The 21st century is the Asian century and their tastes are driving global trends.
(For comparison the USA is 16% of Mercedes global sales.)
If they keep this up, it’ll be even less in the US.
Yet Mercedes’ sales continue to increase year over year in the USA. Same with BMW. Both had record US sales last year.
People on enthusiasts sites have no idea what the car buying public wants.
Sales are down 10% in the US YTD vs ’24, down 17% in Q3, and they can’t give their EVs away, which the interior of this thing emulates, but OK.
Oh, and their appealing to bigger China over US market preferences, but the Chinese are increasingly buying home grown and MB is down 18% YTD, 27% Q3.
Mercedes stopped making most of their electric so of course those dropped.
Looking at their mainstream models the ones that dropped the most are CLA (-50%) Sprinter (-41%) GLB (-40%) C-Class (-31%) None of them have giant door to door screens.
There might just be something going on this year that has nothing to do with screens
Those drops are overall sales and what’s the major change besides the move to too many screens, a trend that’s finally repeatedly coming up as a complaint even among normals? Their EVs are down massive percentages and never came close to expectations in the first place—why is it you think they discontinued them? The SL and S sales are also well down, but you cherry-picked those out for obvious reasons. Must be the tariffs, then, right?
The SL (-30%) doesn’t come with the Hyperscreen. It is an option on the S-Class (-15%)
I think the EQ models failed because the exterior styling is horrible. Something Mercedes is fixing with the replacements.
It’s my fault for not clarifying that it’s not merely the screens, but the entire gimmicky trend they’ve embraced. It’s like a tacky casino when people aren’t even going to Vegas as much anymore. From bland, commercial ad car external design to the overwhelming LED assault of the interior, none of this screams quality, solidity, durability—nothing about them is “MB”. They’re asking people to pay more for something that looks like a bottom barrel juke box with the only justification being the ever-more-embarrassingly-pimped-out 3-pointed star badge. This is something one might expect of a disposable low end brand trying to get noticed, like the domestic Chinese brands they are competing against, but they’re competing as a (probably more expensive) foreign entity when the Chiinese market is turning to domestic and they seemed to have put all their century eggs in that bamboo basket. Sure, they can sell some to vapid influencer types in other countries and they might make fun taxi/Ubers for passengers, but they’re not cheap enough for the latter and they need higher volumes. Even among people who might find it fun at first, this kind of stuff tends to have a seafood-aisle shelf life.
The even bigger problem, IMO (though I guess it’s all my opinion), is the next generation. Once down the gimmick path, where do they go—more gimmicks? The longer it goes, the harder it’s going to be to win back more traditional customers who wanted a serious, solid brand and those new gimmick customers will be onto whatever the next shiny dangly thing is. It bothers me because MB is the only German manufacturer I like and they’ve been the most consistent quality volume vehicle manufacturer for longer than anyone else has been extant and, while I don’t see them going under soon, it’s a worrying trend for them and emblematic of how the Great Enshitification consumes us all like the Nothing in that horribly-paced ’80s kid’s movie where the depressed horse gives up on being alive (I feel you, horse).