This Era Of Mercedes Cars Can’t Die Fast Enough

A safe way to live is to assume a brand owes you nothing. Unless you are a large shareholder of the automaker that owns said brand, you are a convenient cheerleader at best, or a nuisance at worst.

Brands owe you nothing. But, but, but. Some car brands trade on their history. The meaning imbued with certain marques is as valuable as any patent, factory, or executive. This is why any Ferrari is worth more than any comparable McLaren. This is why the default car in America is a Toyota or a Honda crossover.

If reputation has value, that reputation cannot be given by objects. The inert cannot express love. Desire cannot be wrought from stones. If you believe this to be true, then your feelings about a car company, if those feelings be true and strong, are a store of treasure.

The first car I ever owned was a 1978 creamy mustard yellow diesel Mercedes sedan with a cranky transmission, unresponsive A/C, and a diesel engine that gave it all the speed of a wild gazelle with one hoof stuck in a bear trap and the other stuck deep in the mud. It was great.

For car enthusiasts, it’s sometimes the cars you love that prejudice you against a brand the most. Not in this case. My affection for Mercedes endured the many new cars I drove. While not everything was for me, exactly, the cars usually felt a part of that company’s incredible lineage.

That lineage is gone. Replaced with an aesthetic that wants to be more Shanghai than Stuttgart, more Abu Dhabi than Affalterbach. It is an aesthetic not without meaning, it’s just that the meaning is so vapid and tacky as to overwhelm any devout sense of reverence.

Am I Anne Hathaway’s snort from The Devil Wears Prada? Am I missing the point? Is this high fashion? Are the bezzeled knobs, the bright colors, the incomprehensible mix of textures the future? Does China get it, and I don’t? Do I need Lewis Hamilton to explain it to me? Is this avant-garde?

Maybe. But that’s not what bothers me most. I will actually take a car that’s doing everything over a car that’s doing nothing. Too much of modern car design is influenced by Tesla’s Stockholm-by-way-of-Steve Jobs hyper minimalism. Driving a modern Mercedes can sometimes feel like living inside a casino, which I don’t love, but too many new cars make you feel nothing at all.

What bothers me isn’t that it may or may not work visually. Taste is taste. The big letdown is that the cars may not work at all, which is unforgivable in a Mercedes. Dress it up however you like, but superior engineering was the expectation of every Mercedes driver from Bertha Benz to Edi Amin.

And I’m saying this after having spent a week in what’s probably the best non-G-wagen Mercedes, the new AMG E 53 wagon. In spite of everything, I like this Mercedes. The fact that I have to struggle to enjoy a high-horsepower wagon bodes ill for the carmaker and is another reminder that this particular era of Mercedes, which arguably started with the EQS, needs to very quickly evolve into something else.

Mercedes, like pretty much every other German automaker, has been caught flat-footed by a Chinese car industry that was once seen as a little brother. A little brother who went off to sleepaway camp one summer and came back 50 feet tall.

In trying to find a new path while retaining its old customers, I fear that Mercedes has lost itself.

The Basics

Engine: 3.0-liter inline-six turbo plug-in hybrid

Battery pack: 21 kWh battery

Transmission: nine-speed automatic

Drive: all-wheel drive

Output: 577 horsepower (combined), 553 lb-ft of torque (combined)

Fuel Economy: 56 MPGe, 41 miles of range, 22 MPG gas only

Base Price: $93,350

Price As-Tested: $117,630 (including $1,250 destination charge and $1,750 for white paint)

Why Does It Exist?

I grew up with not that much money in a place where most people I knew had more than enough. Because this was suburban, oil-land Houston, nearly all of these people were new money. If you had generational wealth, you lived in a place like River Oaks. If you were a mid-level manager at Enron, I probably went to school with your kid.

These people loved buying as much Mercedes as they could afford (the Benz I had was third-hand off an older German lady who swam with my grandma). There were quite a number of leased S-Classes mixed in with the sudden explosion of MLs. If you had an E-Class, it meant that you couldn’t justify the expense of an S-Class yet.

Then I moved to suburban New York. I had no idea that real rich people didn’t think that way. If your great-grandfather was the first person to sneak a bawdy poem into The Exonian, your parents probably have an E-Class wagon. Hell, if you get that joke, your parents might still have one.

While I don’t see quite as many as I used to, the Hamptons and Westchester used to be absolutely lousy with them. I once asked an owner of the appeal, and they said something about antiques and a fancy type of dog I wasn’t even wealthy enough to visualize. These were just practical cars for very wealthy people who had always bought a car from the Mercedes dealer.

These days, there are only two ways to get a Mercedes wagon in the United States. There’s the E 450 All-Terrain, which is the “off-road” version that just looks like a normal wagon. And there’s this, the AMG E 53 Hybrid wagon. That’s fine by me. I’ve spent a lot of this review already second-guessing Mercedes. I support the two-wagon lineup.

How Does It Look

The EQ sedans and SUVs represent Mercedes embracing all the wrong ideas at once, including the concept that there should be a separate branding for the electric cars, and that the flagship EV shouldn’t look like the flagship car. The SUVs are somehow worse, and may represent the only time a car has been modeled after a butt plug. That’s my assumption at least. After all that work and all that money, Mercedes ended up with a car that was both objectively and subjectively worse than the Model S that had knocked the S-Class off the top of Luxury Sedan Mtn. It was also more expensive.

This isn’t one of those! Perhaps merely out of comparison to the worst of what Mercedes has, aesthetically, I think this is the most attractive new Benz you can buy. The proportions are exactly right, with a long slooping hood that curves seamlessly into a geometrically perfect greenhouse. The d-pillar is so severely raked that it feels like it’s stretching the rear window into another zip code.

So much of the aesthetic here is about restrained beauty that I don’t even mind the light-up grille. At least it’s not just a flat piece of plastic meant to hide a sensor. The way that the taillights protrude over the trunk is also such a clever touch that it almost makes me ignore the interior.

What Is Happening On The Inside?

If Scion came back from the dead, I’d love all of this in a new Scion. Let me say that. I like fun. I don’t mind the playfulness of the interior of this wagon so much as I’m just a little overwhelmed by it. My kid and her friends enjoyed it, and that’s worth something. Am I just old? it’s possible I’m just old.

Let me start with what I genuinely like. The AMG Neva Gray over Black Nappa Leather seats feel right for this car, offering enough support when driving energetically without being too hard or overly bolstered. Do I like the color combination?

It does feel a bit like you’re about to sit in a Stormtrooper’s lap, but some people might pay extra for that! No judgement. The steering wheel also has buttons and dials for adjusting all the various drive modes, traction control, et cetera. These are satisfying dials:

It’s a nice steering wheel, even if the cruise control controls are an annoying piano black.

The main gauge cluster is almost infinitely adjustable, and, for $990, you can make it 3D. Not fake 3D. No glasses required. This isn’t skeuomorphism. It’s actually 3D. It looks blurry if you look at it from an angle or, in my case, if you’re photographing it. You can sort of see how it works in this Instagram reel I shot.

 

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You’ll also get a sense of the color scheme my daughter picked out, which, with its bright teal and pink, is very Spurs a la 1996 or Miami Sound Machine a la forever.

Then there’s the (optional) 14.4-inch center screen, which leaves a lot of room for various displays. Mercedes does not waste space on this display, giving you more data than you’d ever need:

If you ever wanted to know how much torque you were generating by just sitting there, then this is the car for you!

This is all very Tron in a way, and I’m mostly ok with it. Then there’s the passenger screen. Why is this a thing? There’s a huge touchscreen in the middle. Does my passenger really need to adjust the music from over here? It’s a total waste. Don’t do it!

This Stuff Doesn’t Always Work

If you think that looking at all of this is overwhelming, try using it. In theory, Mercedes offers a “zero layer” that allows you to access the key stuff on the screen. In practice, as with all screen-based controls, it’s not intuitive and clunky. Everything involves too many screens, too many options, too many sliders.

It’s also buggy as hell. Trying to make a call with CarPlay using a fairly new iPhone, it would just spit back my request without ever calling anyone. And that’s if I could get CarPlay to launch at all. I frequently had to restart the car just to get it to recognize my phone. The first three or four times I drove the car, it wouldn’t pair at all.

The one antidote to screens is that most cars have redundant controls on the steering wheel. The Mercedes has these, too, and it would be cool if they worked all the time. Am I too cold? Are my fingers too smooth? Does this German car not recognize my Bavarian blood? Why does this car never want to do what I ask it to do?

And it’s not just all this unnecessary technology that intermittently. The car itself is awkward.

Who Is This Car For, Exactly?

I absolutely adored the old E63 AMG Wagon, with its big V8, loud noises, and brash attitude. Other than the lack of a manual gearbox, just about everything about the car was perfect. This car feels just a little less than that car.

There are just weird choices. The brakes are too aggressive and super grabby in a way that makes it not ideal as a commuter. On city streets roughed up by cold temperatures, the ride is just a little too harsh in a way the E63 wasn’t. It’s also slower on paper. It doesn’t feel that way, because the hybrid system gives you a rush of electrical torque to help push you back in, but it’s not as satisfying. I also miss the V8’s roar. The inline-six is fine. This is too much money for fine.

In full fairness to the car, I didn’t take it to the track and was therefore mostly pushing it on the few slower twisty roads I have nearby. On smooth roads with any kind of bend, the Mercedes was just as good as the outgoing E63. I bet this is a great car in Napa. If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s also a PHEV that’s capable of a decent 41 miles of all-electric range.

If I had my druthers, I’d have the old E63 with the AMG V8 and also have this in a slightly lower tune with a softer suspension. In terms of actual performance, it’s just a little too close to the other Benz wagon you can buy, without being as brutish and fast as the Audi RS6 Avant or the BMW M5 Touring Competition.

It sort of makes me wonder who this is for? If you need a fast track car, and also a wagon, but you don’t mind having the slowest of the fast wagons, I guess it’s for you? It’s strange.

Mercedes Is A Brand That Could Benefit From Subtraction

This is a fast wagon that looks better than just about any hybrid you can buy. It’ll haul your groceries and embarrass most sports cars. It feels almost sacrilegious for me to complain about this car. I can’t help it, though; there’s too much going on here. Mercedes needs an editor, so it can focus on what works and cut what doesn’t. This is true of all its products.

Is something going to change? The company parted ways with Gordon Wagener, the designer ostensibly responsible for a lot of these problems. Then I look at interior photos of the new four-door AMG interior and gulp.

Maybe Marc Antony was right: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Top photo: Matt Hardigree