Mercedes-Benz E-Class Estate review

Let’s start at the back. This is an estate after all. 615 litres is generous. It might be outstripped by older E-Classes and several full-size SUVs, but this remains a well packaged car.

Apart from the 460-litre hybrid. You can sort of forgive Mercedes for needing to stuff the battery in somewhere, but surely there's a better fix than 'jack up the boot floor and make it far less practical'?

Fold the seats and that figure only increases to 1,675 litres; the mild hybrid ICE cars have 1,830 litres. The boot floor is wide, deep and pleasingly square. Mum and dad will look forward to loading it for the family holiday. Until they see just how much they've got to squeeze in.

How about life on board for the rest of the family?

The new E-Class is fractionally bigger than its predecessor. And we do mean fractionally, it’s 1mm taller and 4mm longer. The biggest change is to the width, up 28mm, which means the most Merc can boast about is an extra 25mm of elbow room in the rear. That just allows siblings to have more of a swing at each other.

Still, there’s less reason to swing now the 22mm longer wheelbase has resulted in an extra 15mm of rear legroom. It’ll be the centre seat occupant who has most to complain about: there’s still a hefty transmission tunnel running through the centre and the raised perch is more compromised. However, the seating position in the back is much more natural than in the EQE.

Ok, talk to me about features and tech.

Mercedes is doubling down on all this. There’s not only the MBUX Superscreen and selfie camera to get your head around, but various in-car apps, a digital key (only for Apple users at the moment), driving assistance systems, online access via 5G and AI learning. You can ignore it all, but the idea is the car will learn your behaviours – at what outside temperature you engage the heated seats, where you tend to set the navigation for at 7am on a Tuesday – and then make educated guesses to help you out. Whether you see this as a help or not is debatable.

One thing that is a help: the speed limit warning button, permanently fixed in the top right-hand corner of the screen. One tap and the law-imposed annoyance is silenced. We wish this kind of common sense was, er, more common.

Anyhow... this stuff is not going away. Merc, above and beyond other premium marques, is focusing hard on software as its future battleground. For the time being at least, this doesn’t seem to have impacted quality and design elsewhere around the cabin (although we do think it is starting to affect some of the car’s dynamic attributes, such as the coarse engine – there’s only so much money to go round after all). If it really puts you off, buy secondhand.