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I would recommend the Stealth Hitch. Installed it on my E450 Wagon few months back and it works great. Definitely much more expensive than what you can get from e-trailer.com. Solidly built, and when you are not using it, it is completely "stealth".
I don't believe that is available in North America from MB.
it was mistakenly listed on the official Mercedes accessories site last year. I had the whole thing ordered and installed by the dealer including the switch in the trunk. Even got the bike rack. The last step was to code it to enable it, and mb Canada refused to do it because it’s not certified for NA. The entire rear bumper bar is replaced with the euro version so probably some liability there. They were forced to removed the whole thing.
I was so close.
you can’t really tow anything with it because you’ll need a trailer that attaches to that metric ball, which doesn’t really exist here because everything is imperial and off by enough to catastrophically fail. All the trailer shops basically said they won’t even let me pull a trailer off their lot. So it’s really just an expensive clean looking bike rack hitch.
it was mistakenly listed on the official Mercedes accessories site last year. I had the whole thing ordered and installed by the dealer including the switch in the trunk. Even got the bike rack. The last step was to code it to enable it, and mb Canada refused to do it because it’s not certified for NA. The entire rear bumper bar is replaced with the euro version so probably some liability there. They were forced to removed the whole thing.
I was so close.
you can’t really tow anything with it because you’ll need a trailer that attaches to that metric ball, which doesn’t really exist here because everything is imperial and off by enough to catastrophically fail. All the trailer shops basically said they won’t even let me pull a trailer off their lot. So it’s really just an expensive clean looking bike rack hitch.
Oh that sucks, after all that to not be able to complete the installation. I guess if the metric ball would have been an issue that would have made it a no go anyway.
A metric 50 mm trailer ball is only 3/100" smaller than an imperial 2" ball. They are virtually interchangeable size wise. The real difference is in the weight class, class III vs. class IV or class V.
I wasn’t planning on towing. I literally bought it for the bike rack. I was just out trailer shopping with a friend and inquired. They said for liability reasons we wouldn’t be able to leave with the trailer on a metric ball.
the explanation for why they wouldn’t do the coding was it’s not certified for Canada. I was even happy to sign a declaration that it would not be used for towing, so my guess is the bumper bar itself is the problem in the case of a rear end accident.
