I got my E450C in November after waiting since Mothers day of last year. The first two weeks of April this year I was able to take it on its first road trip. I had tickets to the Monday practice round at the Masters in Augusta GA. We did the Masters, went to Nashville and then to Colonial Williamsburg before returning home to RI.

In general the car behaved great. It's a fine road machine and it was a joy to drive. Additionally, my wife hurt her back a couple of days before we left and even as of the morning we were leaving I was going to cancel the trip. After all, sitting for hours in a car is not usually a good prescription for back troubles. But she did well and was very comfortable in the car and after two days of traveling was in good enough shape to walk Augusta National. So two cheers for riding comfort.

The Bad;
First I don't have my communications module yet, so Live Traffic was missing and this would have been one of the only times I would really have cared about it. So there's a huge miss. Plus there were dozens of cases where I looked up hotels, restaurants and attractions on my iPhone and would have liked to throw the address to the Nav system, but once again, feature missing for now.

The Nav system is not wonderful. Lots of times I couldn't enter the address of a hotel because it didn't know the road or the address was East XX street and it only knew it by E XX street so it wouldn't take the address. That's a real pain in the neck. A Nav system should be smarter than that. At one point it showed on the map that I should take the next right, but the voice told me to take the next left. That's an embarrassing bug to still have in there. And it often routed me through strange contortions, like when driving home through NYC on Rt 95 and it made me get off 95, drive for about a mile and get back on 95. That's just dumb. But overall it was functional and I used it all the time.

One amazing incident. I was pulled in at a hotel and I tried to back up / parallel park into a quite large opening between two cars. As I was driving backwards into the slot there was huge bang and the car jerked to a stop. I jumped out almost crying because I had obviously just racked up my Mercedes. But it turned out I was nowhere near the SUV behind me. Not a mark on either car. I BELIEVE the car thought I was backing up too quickly towards the SUV and slammed on the brakes to stop me. I guess better that than hitting the car, but wow, that was scary.

All in all though it was all a positive experience with the car. Solid consistent performance. AND on average 32MPG during the highway portions of the trip. For this size engine in an all wheel drive car, that ain't too bad.

 

I hope the car continues to impress. Have you tried Apple Carplay since you have an iPhone for navigation? I use AndroidAuto (wirelessly thanks to Motorola MA-1) and Waze/Google Maps are excellent. Built-in navigation, not so much. But that's been the case with every Mercedes I've had.

 

Curious, are your seats the standard leather or Nappa leather? Was the vehicle equipped with massage as well?

 

I have tried Apple CarPlay and it works well. I have to admit, a couple of times I fell back to using it. I was trying hard to like/test the built in Nav though.

 

Standard Leather, no massage. My wife is not fond of massage chairs in general so I doubt she would have used it. I wanted to use the heated seats (adjusting it to only heat her back and not her seat) but she didn't want that either. I can only offer.

In the end, the standard leather seats of the coupe and the standard coupe suspension gave her a comfortable enough ride that her back recovered during the driving instead of getting worse. Lucky us.

 

I see, I appreciate your reply. I am also glad to hear that the seats are comfortable and that she is recovering.

 

I got my E53 last November also.

Still no Hermes module available for installation.(I called yesterday)

I only use voice input for Navigation programming.