Even some basic controls are not intuitive thanks to government's hands in the design.
The console mounted transmission stick is one that has always bugged me. Pull back to go forward and push forward to go back.

 

There's always the "back" button! I still have my order in for a e43, so I'll deal with it. Regards. Ned.

 

OPs concern wasn't that he didn't know how to use COMAND, it's that it takes too many actions to do something, thus distracting you from driving.

 

Deja vu! Reminds me of the Bangle criticism with the then new 2004(?) 7 series bmw.

 

Why do people keep pretending that the E300 approaches E350 levels of performance? Here's the reality:

E350:
https://www.edmunds.com/mercedes-ben...st-specs2.html : 6 Seconds
http://www.motortrend.com/cars/merce...on-first-test/ : 5.8 seconds
http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/...an-test-review : 5.8 seconds

Both cars: http://www.zeroto60times.com/vehicle...-60-mph-times/

E300
http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/...ic-test-review : 6.5 seconds
http://www.motortrend.com/cars/merce...-drive-review/ : 6.5 seconds

Weights differences are listed anywhere from 60-80 lbs... so you're saving the weight of an american 8 year old. Good job.

You think there's a conspiracy from the above sources to lie about the 0-60 times of the car? Don't be so naive.

 

Despite all the joking about the loss of CD player and comparing it to 8 track and cassette players, not quite the same. I personally am not happy about no CD player. I have a 1000 cds in my music collection and many of the other digital formats are compressed files with inferior sound quality, how's that work on a high end Burmester sound system. Cassettes were better than 8 track, cds better than cassettes, compressed digital WORSE than cd. Going backward. Millenials know nothing about good sound, just give them ear buds. Regards. Ned.

 

That's exactly right. I know how to use the system, I just feel very strongly that it's poorly designed. I would prefer to be able to change the song AND arrive safely at my destination, that's one of the reasons that I feel the car is unsafe to drive.

And to reiterate again to any potential buyers, I suggest that you take the car for a spin for a couple hours to really test things out.

 

You should transfer your CD stuff to a solid state drive (SSD). There are USB drives that are large enough to hold your entire collection uncompressed. FLAC is a lossless compression method. I don't know if the high end Burmester for Mercedes can play it. It should. I put my collection on my home server and simply transfer playlists to a small USB drives as desired. I keep them in the console. They are easily transferred between cars.

 

The obvious thing to do but I'm lazy! Your 2015 e400 sounds gorgeous! Great and different exterior and interior combo. Excellent! Regards. Ned.

 

Just get a 128gb iPod, rip all of your CDs to iTunes using the apple lossless format, then synch with your iPod and keep it permanently plugged into the car's USB port and you'll have access to ~3000 songs (so maybe 1/3 of your collection) in full CD quality without having to worry about carrying around CDs. Another recommendation. Do a true ABx test between apple lossless and 256kbps AAC files. I bet you won't be able to tell the difference. I'm a bit of an audiophile and have a collection of DVD-A and SACD discs, and while they sound great on my home sound system, when I did an ABx test of different bit rates (using an external USB headphone amplifier and a pair of Bowers & Wilkins headphones), I could not reliably detect a difference (no better than random guessing) between music samples once the bit rate got above 256kbps. You might find you could rip your entire CD collection at 256kbps and fit it all on a single iPod and be perfectly happy with the sound quality

 

These are all great modern day digital solutions. But how do I play my vinyl in my e43? No turntable option? A travesty! Regards. Ned.

 

You just need one of these

 

Love it! I want one, with the upgraded linear tracking tone arm and Koetso Onyx cartridge. Regards. Ned.

 

So that is the new MB P4 infotainment upgrade option. Looks great! Don't forget to get the special order optional turntable hand crank that allows you to experience MB's new musical mobility feature. It allows you to unplug the turntable from the dash, so you can take your music with you. Talk about innovation! Imagine being able to listen to your favorite music as you walk around. What will they think of next? Wow!

 

i heard vinyl records skip a lot when in sport suspension mode -- come on Mercedes get it together

 

Yeah I hear there will be a service bulletin coming out soon to address the problem. The problem must be pretty common with this option in the new model. You would have thought MB would have gotten it right the first time. Especially for the new E class. So much for "The best or nothing". What is this world coming to?

 

bro I hear ya ... I'm waiting for "compact discs" ... which should help with this issue!!

 

But they don't sound as good, I need that ultimate fidelity of the real analog waves. Mercedes must fix this skipping problem or I'm going to buy an Edsel, they know how to build a flawless car. Regards. Ned.

 

lol... you analog fanboys are all the same!!

 

The new COMAND is certainly a bit sluggish and certainly does hide a small number of options which you initially have to dig for, but I have to disagree with OP about how dangerous it is. The beauty of the system is the numerous ways you can achieve the same goal. It means your pick one you like. To change an mp3 can done by the central wheel (one click one track, how hard or dangerous is that) or by the steering wheel left or right track pads depending on whether you have media up on the instrument screen or not. You can even say next track. Really struggling to understand how that is dangerous.

Perhaps, if you're hopped up on coke, it's easy to get impatient and distracted waiting for the track to change but that means you need a lifestyle change not a change of car . Before I collected mine I asked that the system get all the software updates available, if youve an old build that could be slowing things down.

Now as a "tech" guy surely you must know safety critical functions aren't going to be handled by the same equipment that plays your in-car tunes? Saying you can't trust critical safety features of the car because some UI aspects are glitchy is like saying you don't trust your doctor because he wears sandals or a garish shirt. I don't work in the car industry so I can't comment from an expert's viewpoint but I am a seasoned aeronautical engineer and know how to design and validate complex systems.

I will agree that the voice control, whilst better than the w212 (much shorter path to what you want on the new system) is still a pita but some of that is due to us all being spoilt by natural speech searches on Google and apples devices. It's reliable voice recognition for me, just a bit clunky but still way better than w212 which you're obviously well used to.

Anyway, I have the full drive pilot system and so regularly trust the car with my life to slow down in heavy fast traffic and I've no concerns with doing so and no reservations in recommending the car. It rides and handles far better then my old e300 hybrid, turns in the same mpg more or less, is quieter, far more comfortable and has a stunning, if disappointingly rattling, interior (early build quality, price to pay for early adopters).

 

I wasn't referring to next track, that can be handled in 2-4 steps, depending on which method you elect to use, I'm referring to other simple and frequent tasks such as changing folders and selecting a song. That can easily take 6+ and has been distracting to myself, my wife, and others. Voice command works some of the time for "play song X", but then you are usually left in an infinite loop of that song playing over and over because you can't advance to the next song because it created a virtual playlist of just song X. And again, voice command is fair at best as far as the recognition quality. Try saying "Navigate Home", It's also fun to say "Nearest Walgreens" and see a list of residential addresses.

As far as safety systems having priority, I would have agreed, but maybe you missed my comments about the car not turning off, or stopping when it wasn't required. Additionally, there are other systems challenges, for example, the car not remote starting and reporting that the hazards are on, or that the windows are down, when they aren't. And before anyone says maybe the windows were actually cracked a bit, like the dealer did, I showed them my text message history from the car that went something like this:

10/23/2016 6:00:10p - Unable to start car because the windows were down
10/23/2016 6:00:20p - Unable to start car because the windows were down
10/23/2016 6:00:30p - Unable to start car because the harzards were on
10/23/2016 6:00:45p - Your car was successfully started

 

I haven't driven the new E, so these are general comments only: it seems many, perhaps most, new cars have tech that can be dangerous to operate while driving because of the attention it demands from the driver. I get the feeling that the people who design the interfaces never actually test them while driving. Also, the suggestions to people to rip their cd's to high-res files is a good one IF the person has the time for that. Personally, I would rather have a cd player. A few years ago, it took me months to rip about half my cd's to an ipod, and that was in mp3 format. It took months because, well, I have a life. I can't imagine how much longer it would take to rip them in a high-res format.

 

It really doesn't take that much time and who says you have to do it all at once. When I buy a CD, the first thing I do is rip it to iTunes. Takes about 3 minutes. And yes, I have a life too. I wouldn't think there'd be many people who don't already have the majority of their CD's ripped to iTunes (or some other library)

 

I've had my 2017 E300 4M for almost two months now, and still love the car. I'm biased though since I loved the physical design of the car the moment I saw it, and purchased one from inventory shortly after. Since this topic has a negative slant, I thought I'd share what I don't like about it.

- It's such a solid feeling car so I can't understand why on earth MB chose to use that piano black plastic on the center stack downwards. You can blow across the top of it and watch dust scratch it, it's that scratch-prone.

- The front stowage compartment is surrounded by this chrome-like plastic trim which has already started peeling due to my phone rubbing against it when I remove it. This stuff is seriously cheap. I'm talking cheap plastic with an even cheaper plastic veneer.

- The wireless charging is not useful since it's of the older wireless standard. What good is 8 hours to fully charge my phone? Hopefully MB made it modular to allow me to upgrade it to a fast wireless charging system should one become available.

- In order to get QC2.0+ rates of fast charging, I need to use a 12V socket, the only one of which is accessible to the back seats. Making one available in the front stowage compartment would've been a better design decision IMHO.

- And COMAND? It's pretty awful.

1. COMAND takes forever to power on to a functional state. I haven't clocked it but on the order of a full minute before I can enter a GPS destination or navigate my music collection. Powering on the car is analogous to having to powering on your phone from a powered off state each time you want to use it. It's 2016 for crying out loud! Persist the running state to flash and restore it to memory!

2. The COMAND interface is inconsistent. In some cases, a clockwise turn of the wheel will scroll down while in other cases it will scroll up (eg: menu navigation vs GPS zoom)

3. Voice recognition is both error prone and painfully slow. I think the car needs an online connection in order for voice recognition to work (please correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty certain of this). It's sad to have to admit my 3 year old portable Garmin is light years ahead in this regard.

4. The GPS does not show you the route as a turn-by-turn list. At best, you can identify the next turn via 1) audio callout 2) the lcd behind the steering wheel. If you choose the latter, your only means of controlling music is via the center screen which squashes the GPS map to a tiny square, making it basically unusable.

5. Adjusting the volume during a GPS announcement permanently adjusts the announcement volume. I've done this to turn down the music only to have realized later that I've missed my GPS turns because the announcement volume was turned down. Flashing the screen of the lcd behind the steering wheel would have been a great option since it's easier to see in your periphery than the central lcd.

6. Even with multiple input methods only the wheel works consistently in Android Auto. The touchpads work intermittently depending on which app is in focus.

7. The media player is awful. To those with large CD collections, I highly recommend encoding your CDs to flac, and then using a program like Mediamonkey to automatically transcode the flac to high quality mp3 upon insertion of the memory card to your computer. It's a painless way to keep your music collection updated.
a. The good news is that COMAND supports flac playback. The bad is that it doesn't handle flac tags properly. Browsing a flac-encoded album results in an alphabetical listing of the tracks whereas mp3s are displayed in their proper track order.
b. Tracks with a common album name but different artists (eg: artist featuring artist XYZ) are listed as separate albums even when browsing by album! A workaround is to browse by folder, assuming you've organized your tracks within folders.
c. No way to maintain playlists!
d. Search loses state once you start playing a song. Upon searching and playing a song, you can't back out to the previous search results. Instead, you must search from scratch.

...and despite all of these issues, I'm seriously loving this car. I love the way this car looks, rides, handles, and sounds (that is, the Burmester sound system). Regarding engine sound, I'm still mystified how the engine (M274) sounds like a diesel at idle. Still, it's been decades since I've felt so moved by the design of a car, and I know I'm going to hold onto her as long as I can.

 

You can create your playlist on a flash drive or portable HDD and then just copy to the media register...I actually use both the media register and have a portable HDD. I'm awaiting delivery...but when I test drove one the command interface was not that much different than my 15' C400...it seems to be a pretty nice car!