Mercedes-Benz E-Class Estate 2016 Review

Mercedes-Benz E 350 d Estate

International Launch Review

Get past the necessarily conservative styling (for necessarily conservative German executives) and there’s everything to like about Mercedes-Benz’s E 350 d Estate, and the rest of the range, too. The ride is sumptuous, the interior tech is overwhelmingly good and easy to use, and it covers ground with class and dignity. It’s the best Benz wagon ever made, and that’s saying a lot.

If you were Mercedes-Benz and you’d just floated an E-Class sedan onto the market that was both critically acclaimed and a sales hit, you’d have a long, hard think about it before you tampered with the formula too much.

The sedan is, after all, a step so far forward in interior design over its predecessor that it’s almost two generations ahead, just like the current C-Class was.

While the E-Class’s chief engineer, Michael Kelz, aimed up at building the best E-Class Estate in his company’s history, first things are first. There are established rivals to crush underfoot, too, like the Audi A6 Avant and BMW’s 5 Series Touring (both nearing the final phases of their production cycles), plus Sweden’s luxuriously cabined, shiny new Volvo V90.

And, straight up, nice and early, we’ll tell you this: the seven-seat E 350 d Estate wipes the floor with all of them. BMW and Audi have new machinery in the pipeline (BMW’s will land first, in Paris) and whatever they do will need to be special to get on top of the E-Class Estate.

It’s big, it’s refined, it rides sumptuously, it carries high cornering speeds with little apparent effort and it still uses all of the E-Class sedan’s tech. It looks a little conservative, but that’s always been an E-Class thing, after all.

The main reason people look at a wagon in this class is for interior space and luggage capacity and the E-Class Estate has plenty of both.

The boot totes 640 litres of stuff with the rear seats (up 40 litres on the old car) in their normal position and another 30 litres with the top of the rear seats tilted forward 10 degrees to give it a touch more space even with the rear seats still occupied. Then it boosts that to 1820 litres with the 40:20:40 rear seats folded flat. The first E-Class wagon, the 1978 W123-series, only had a then-impressive 523 litres of luggage space (actually, that’s still impressive, given that it’s about the size of a C-Class today).

It’s not just space, but usable space. The floor is flat, the loading lip is non-existent, there’s 1100mm of width between the rear wheelarches and the tailgate opening is broad enough to double as a rich man’s commercial van. There are electrical switches to drop the rear seats both in the luggage area and alongside the seats themselves and it’s all plonked atop a self-levelling, air-suspended rear-end.

It’s rated to carry 750kg of stuff (and to tow 2100kg) and Kelz insists he’s personally loaded one with 19 crates each filled with 20 German half-litre beer bottles. Whether he’s knocked them all over already, he wouldn’t say, but the E-Class development was clearly painstaking...

A small price has been paid in the back seat, though, because the backrest is flat and relatively unsupportive and the footroom beneath the front seats is limited. We’ll have to wait until next year to find out if things are more comfortable than they were in the third row of seats.

This 350 d clearly won’t be the big seller of the E-Class Estate range. That’s going to fall to the 200 d when it starts life later this year and the 220 d until then, especially when the Germans, who love four-pot diesels, snap up E-Class wagons at exactly the same rate as sedans, so it’s 1:1.

The 220 d punches with 143kW and 400Nm (compared to the petrol four in the E250 with its 155kW and 350Nm), and you can’t argue with its 4.2L/100km on the NEDC cycle.

But, at 7.7sec, it doesn’t scoot to 100km/h like the 350 d and it doesn’t have the 3.0-litre turbo-diesel’s sophistication and dignity, either.

The biggest of the diesel range (so far), the E 350 d gets to 100km/h in only 6.0sec and feels utterly effortless in doing it. That’s partly because it has access to an enormous 620Nm of torque from as little as 1600rpm, then it translates that to 190kW from 3400rpm.

It pays a price at the pump, for sure, but it still tallies a respectable 5.9L/100km for 140g/km of CO2.

All the E-Class Estates link the engines to the rest of the powertrain through nine-speed automatic transmissions and it’s one of the cars unsung heroes in this E 350 d guise. It’s slick, barely noticeable most of the time and quick to decide on a gear when you want it to be.

While there are some refinement issues on full throttle with the 2.0-litre turbo-diesel, the V6 is a different animal altogether, smoothly masking rough inputs and aggressive requests with a combination of strength and dignity. There are no weak points in its delivery, with the torque peak extending up to 2400rpm, and at no point does it become ill-mannered.

It’s at its best when it’s being driven like you expect an E-Class Estate to be driven, in a relaxed, business-like way.

It’s happy to be hustled, which is something of a surprise given its predecessor, and it won’t put a sure-foot wrong, but it has a bit too much roll and not enough steering feel to be a thoroughbred. There’s nothing much there to get the blood pumping – and that’s exactly to be expected.

In every other circumstance, it proved a remarkable mile-eater on the smooth roads of northern Germany, up near Denmark, with its standard air suspension soaking up every sought-out bump and imperfection we could locate and, at worst, delivering a slight thump through the cabin.

It rides with a remarkable dignity and seemingly pays no price whatsoever in its cornering ability. It carries a disturbing amount of speed through faster bends when it’s asked to, but the ride quality never deteriorates no matter how many difficult questions you ask of the chassis.

The ride remains supple and comfortable and particularly quiet in all of its driving modes, even the sportiest of them, and it just seems like there’s no way to ruffle its composure.

It takes everything the E-Class sedan gets in the interior, and adds a concierge service (at least, it does in Europe) that lets you not only make a one-touch call to the service to search for and book things like restaurants, shows or ferries, but sends the details through to the car’s navigation system directly while it’s at it.

Like the sedan, everything inside it feels high quality and beautifully crafted, though the full-width wing dash design won’t be for everyone. The vents are big and easy to operate and the enormous configurable dashboard is clear and easy to fiddle with, with one massive exception.

Plug an iPhone in to the system, even if just to charge it, and the CarPlay overrides anything you and the satellite navigation have already agreed to, switching to Apple’s mapping, so you not only have to enter all the information again, but you have to enter in all the waypoints, if you have any. Kelz says it’s an Apple problem and that Apple insisted that using CarPlay meant all of CarPlay, but it’s not a problem Audi has with the same setup. Kelz later admitted a planned 2017 software upgrade will overcome the issue.

Other than that, the front seats are remarkably comfortable and supportive, the cabin is near silent pretty much all the time and the equipment levels are ridiculously high. It carries over all of the sedan’s semi-autonomous and driver-support electrical aids, and that already means class-leading.

In short, it’s a brilliant offering from Benz. Anybody who comes to the E-Class for its conservative visuals won’t be put off by the dignity of everything else, and the design isn’t quite so conservative to put off anybody who comes for the rest of it.

It’s not only the best E-Class Estate in Benz’s history, but quite possibly the best car Benz makes today.

2016 Mercedes-Benz E 350 d pricing and specifications:
Price: TBA
Engine: 3.0-litre six-cylinder turbo-diesel
Output: 190kW/620Nm
Transmission: Nine-speed automatic
Fuel: 5.4L/100km (NEDC Combined)
CO2: 140g/km (NEDC Combined)
Safety Rating: TBA