I see, all good! The confusion is cleared. TURO and some other services are just not enough time to decide if someone wants to buy a car for a long term I guess but better than nothing.

 

Prior to Covid and I believe now, at lease end nearly 90% of the time the car is turned back. This is because other than during Covid nearly 100% of the time, there was no equity in the car: the buy back was higher than the market value.

That however may be changing: When I last leased the residual which is what the Buy Back is based on, for 36 months, 10k miles per was between 60% and 54%. If you leased in December of 2018 for a 2019 model the residual was 60%. In September of 2025 the residual may have dropped to 56% or ever 54%.

However in March of 2025 on a 2025 E450 the residual, 36 months, 10K miles per year, was 52%. With such a low residual several things have happened:

• The monthly payments are very high
• At the end of the lease, in all probability, there will be equity in your car: A three year old car should be worth substantially more than 52% of MSRP.

What this means is that at lease end, most in order to capture that equity, will wind up buying there cars. If that is the case, this is not a lease which is depreciation + interest, but a finance plan to buy a car with a balloon at the end.

Hope this clarifies.

 

I wonder if the highlighted portion will be true a couple of years from today. I feel the build quality of these vehicles have substantially come down over the models that were being sold just a few years back, mainly from covert and overt cost-cutting. That 52% may not be a random number, but based on their internal research.

MB is competing with carmakers that they would have sneezed at just a few years back, but are now fighting on the backfoot to stay competitive with. Competitors have upped their game everywhere, and Mercedes etc no longer have a monopoly on either Technology or outright quality, or even the recognition from a storied history, while the competitors sell for substantially less and at a higher quality level. Genesis in particular, comes to mind. I was shocked at the quality of a Mazda CX-90, that I sat in recently.

Constant beating down by Consumer Reports and other such publications about serious quality and reliability shortcomings, certainly don't sound great, especially for products that are priced stratospherically. And the energy costs going up several fold in the home country, does not help things either, especially since the engine/transmission etc are still built in Germany, for the most part. All of which leads to the aforementioned cost-cutting to stay solvent.

Am I personally thrilled about the acres of "MB-Tex" (Vinyl/plastic) bathing the entire interior of the 2024/2025 E-class ? Something that used to be real-wood just a couple of years back ? Am I thrilled about all of the physical metal buttons, switches and knobs being replaced with lifeless (and multiple) presses on a screen ? This is the Kia-ization or Hyundai-ization of Mercedes Benz, but without a commensurate price reduction indicative of the downmarket move in material quality.

PS: Last week, I was on a business trip, and got a Kia Sonata as my rental car. That car had a super-responsive dual-screen, driving the wireless Apple Carplay, and the climate controls had a separate screen of its own, which was always on, without having to dive into the primary screen to do basic climate stuff. For instance, in the E450, when Apple Carplay is running (pretty much all the time), I need more than one press on the screen, to do what I want to get done (at which time, Apple Carplay disappears from the screen, which I certainly do not want). Very poor implementation of the main screen, after rushing to get rid of the physical buttons. Maybe they should learn from Kia.

 

This thread has gone too far off topic.

Back to oil, add some in if you can before your next service OP. Good luck.

 

Thank you!

 

Most of MB's funds went in EV development I guess.

 

Yup, adding some to at least middle of min and max is a good idea, too much or too close to max, it will complain when it heats up as oil expands.

 

If in fact the Mercedes E Class losses 50% of its value in 3 years, sales will plummet. A $80,000 car, considering use of money at just 5% for three years is $12,000 plus $40,000 depreciation means your cost for three years is $52,000 or $1440 per month, which by the way is the monthly lease payment. To this must be added sales tax and possibly tariffs.

This is one of the reasons sales in 2019 of E Class in the US were over 40,000 and in 2024 had dropped to less than 18,000 in 2024.

 

I guess another reason is the price increase and MB's strategy was to cut production in general and to maximize profit instead of maximize sale volume/units. Somewhere along the lines of going back upmarket.

 

The E class is the bread and butter in Europe for MB. I doubt they want to constrain production. To go upscale from the E is the S: these sales, while generating profits, are very, very small, so no I do not agree MB is consciously cutting back on E Class sales. I think it is the market speaking.

see: https://carbuzz.com/mercedes-benz-s-...uxury-segment/

 

Upmarket as in this https://www.futuremanagementgroup.co...ture-strategy/

They also said they are more focused on the price per unit sold instead of units sold in total. So not chasing sales numbers, I didn't mean E class exactly but in general.

 

That is why I keep all of my cars 10-15 years or until a major repair, which ever comes first. I have not had a major repair in the last 15 years.

 

”Going back upmarket” ? By Kia-izing the interior of the E-class ? By replacing real-wood and top-notch cameras from the prior generation with acres of vinyl and el-cheapo cameras all around the car ? By replacing high quality/top-tactile-feel, directly-operable metal knobs/buttons/switches, with multiple touches on a screen ? To me, this looks like the exact reverse direction of “upmarket”.

But got to admit that they have kept prices fairly steady, by IMHO, decontenting the interior and by lowering the quality of the materials used in the interior. Of course the primary reason is due to their energy costs soaring several fold over the past few years (for reasons that are not too difficult to understand), and decontenting/using-cheaper-materials/equipment, was their only way out, Versus keeping the same quality level, and having to raise their prices by say 10K$ to keep the margins the same.

My 2025 E450 All-Terrain wagon, costed roughly the same as my 2022 E450 All-Terrain wagon, give-or-take a few 1000$. And since I have/had both cars, I can easily compare and contrast the quality of both products and see what’s changed - whether for the better or for the worse. Someone who never had a W213 E450, and purely uses the W214 E450 as their only reference point, may never know how drastically things have changed.

 

Bingo ! This is the way to stay ahead of the curve.

Even though I sold my 2022 E450 All-Terrain to a family member, I would normally have kept it for the same duration as my prior ML-class (240K miles and subsequently donated). I hope to keep my current 2025 E-class for 10-15 years, and barring anything drastic coming up over the next 40-50K miles, it should go the 10-15years’ duration.

 

I believe you have posted that on average you drive between 2,500/3,000 miles per year.

At 10 years you will have less than 30,000 miles and at 15 years less than 40,000 miles.

With such low mileage it would be shocking if you had any major repairs!

 

That’s the perspective from a group. I don’t necessarily agree with a big portion of what they have opined. They have latched onto the full-electric bandwagon, and expect a fully electrified future by 2030 etc. I doubt it.

It is not just the vehicles themselves, but also the aspects of generating the electricity/infrastructure needed to power them, the charging infrastructure needed to freely drive wherever (like with a gas car) without “range anxiety” etc. 5 years for all of that….seems like a pipe-dream to me, given where we are, and going by Electric cars sitting unsold for months or years, while their PHEV, Hybrid and ICE equivalents sell like hot-cakes.

 

I guess to make it (the brand) more exclusive like cutting the amount of units sold and getting rid of entry level models... That sort of "upmarket"

 

As much as you appear to detest the new E-Class and prefer the prior generation, I wonder why you bought it. Was none of this apparent when you test drove the car and compared against your current car at that time?

 

If you haven't noticed, MB kept on releasing a bunch limited production models and ultra luxury in the form of Mythos. Don't remember which vehicles but on this forum's home page, they have a 1 of 100(?) limited retro G wagen shown. Then there is also some limited version of Maybach shown. There are so many different ones (especially in the form of the W223) I lost count, it started last year and more so this year.

 

I don’t “detest” my current car. Objectively/subjectively, the quality has gone down, for the new generation E-class. But that’s the nature of the terrain. I intend to keep it for the next 10-15 years, regardless.

And yes, it was my mistake that I did not extensively test-drive the car or do a detailed assessment of the features of the car prior to purchasing it, since I already had a near-identical prior version of the car, and assumed (for the most part), that a “next generation” product would never go backward, from a prior generation product. I was aware of many functions being moved onto the screen, but never questioned how user-friendly (or user-unfriendly) it would be, and that I’d just have to get used to doing things differently.

Once I had the car for a few days, and once the new car euphoria died down a bit, I started noticing the details. Bad assumptions on my part, of course, regarding a “next generation” product from Mercedes, being automatically better than a prior generation product.

PS: As I think about it, let’s assume that things had occurred differently, and that I did a truly detailed assessment of the car, and did notice that a significant portion of the natural-wood had disappeared, and that the climate function buttons had gone away and transferred onto the screen, and that the quality of the cameras were severely degraded over the prior version, and that the “digital lights” were a poor quality cousin of the prior generation “Multi-Beam LEDs” and that they skimped on the fuel tank size etc………I would have made excuses for Mercedes Benz, justified these shortcomings in my mind, and still bought the car, since I really like the E-wagons, and the Mercedes brand…..but the decision would have been made with both eyes open

 

Is a slight degradation of the pixel quality of the cameras such a big problem? Why is that such a thorn in your side?

 

I think it is just the opposite: MB has brought out the A, B and C class. The biggest selling in the US is the GLC.

To compete worldwide MB had to go downscale: the idea is that once a person bus an A Class, they then be a customer the next time for a B Class and so on.

 

Yup, the “slight degradation” one experiences when moving from a 4K image to a 480P image, when projected onto a big screen. I have learned to live with it, since it is what it is, and no point in beating this dead horse one more time.

 

I totally agree. The Mercedes A-class and their B-class were cost-effective front-wheel-drive based platforms (with some all-wheel-drive hardware added in for the 4-matic versions), that they had to introduce to compete at the bottom volume sales area. Not sure if BMW introduced their X1 (front-wheel-drive based platform, based on the Mini Cooper) first, or did Mercedes introduce the A/B classes first.

The first MB that starts life as a premium rear-wheel-drive based platform (with AWD hardware added in for the 4Matic versions), is the GLC or the C-class. Similarly, on the BMW side, it is the X3 and the 3-Series.

I think the GLC and the GLE interchangeably compete for the best selling MB title. Within a few 1000 units of each other.

 

2024 GLC sales: 64,163
2024 GLE Sales: 67,928