Easy question please: Is the S-Class made by a Mercedes' "A-team" or is quality build standard across all models? I know the S-Class uses higher-end materials, but from a quality perspective, are they built to the same standard?

I had a 2008 E350 which I absolutely loved. I can't imagine I'm going to trade in my 2018 S560 (it's low mileage and has been a dream), but they've got a fully loaded 2026 E450 in "my" color scheme I'd definitely consider (I'm non-mechanical so having a new car under warranty is appealing to me and I can't see affording a new S-Class). My kiddo would definitely prefer to have the S-Class back seat . Any thoughts/advice appreciated please. Thanks!

 

I think you want the worker who has been making the E-Class, continue to make the E-Class, and same goes for the worker who makes the S-Class. As far as the back seat goes, there is a good amount of room in the back of an E-Class these days, as a former S-Class (2008) owner, I was impressed.

Trenton O. Gibson
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I plan to check out an E one day, but was disheartened the other day to see someone say a Honda Civic has more rear seat room. Struck home of course because my wife's car is a Civic.

We love the rear seat room in the S560 and would have a hard time giving it up, especially if an otherwise wonderful E were noticeably tight in back.

 

I had a new E350 loaner, I was surprised how much I liked it. Optioned with air suspension (or even without like the loaner I had) it is definitely an enjoyable vehicle to drive, but space in the rear is dramatically limited vs the S Class you would miss that, and you will moss the finish differences for sure as the reduction in quality materials is everywhere you look and touch.

 

Actually and specifically the W213, it does have less leg room than the accord https://mbworld.org/forums/w213-amg/...d-e-class.html

 

The short answer is, they are built by the same people. Mercedes and other manufacturers used to have separate production lines per model or model family. The E and GT 4-door used to be built on the same line, though. But this type of production has a major downside. If a certain model has low sales, they have to reduce or even stop that production line, so Mercedes moved to production lines that make all models on the same lines. That way the line can be balanced out based on the models that sell. When I toured the factory back in 2019, they had just finished the new production line in a new building that was gonna build the E and S class. That production line is in Sindelfingen. Mercedes has other plants of course. There's one in Bremen for example that builds the GLC and C Class. So not all models are built on the very same line, but per factory, the production lines are no longer separated by model. Also, certain models are not even built in Germany anymore or depending on the market they are built somewhere else for that market. MB has plants in South Africa and USA. So are the people at the Sindelfingen plant the A-team, or the Bremen plant and how do the skill levels compare to the teams that are not located in Germany? The answer is the teams are made up of people who live in the area. Bremen and Sindelfingen are quite far apart, so each factory has local people working there.

 

OP current cars with all the huge screens and hybrid systems look great on a specs page and are to some enjoyable to drive. When software gets scrambled due to low voltage or just having a bad hair day you may find yourself with all screens that are black. Now there is no interacting with the car and it has in most cases forgotten altogether that A/C or heat had been called upon as well as audio and all the other things we do via the screens. So a ride on the tow truck to the only game that will be able to figure it out. Then it takes the time it takes.

Hybrid fun is less prone to failure (not to say it is immune!) but I can assure you that once out of warranty and you are presented with Myriad possible failures (after getting to pay the dealership several hours to figure it out) you will find that any real or imagined 'savings due to increased fuel economy' have well and truly gone up in smoke. Hopefully figuratively.

Electric A/C compressors and all that go along with are failing early and often.

Your 222 car is a very good one to hold on to.

 

^ Yeah, kinda hits the nail. What has clearly happened in recent years is the cheapening of materials across the board. Plastic is used where once more premium materials were used, so the interiors are creaking and just don't feel as solid anymore. The big screen interiors frankly also have little character. Just a plastic dash with a screen tacked on now. It doesn't matter who puts the car together if the materials used are cheap. Then there are the electronics and software as mentioned above. The mechanics don't really fail on modern cars, but the electronics and software tends to act up and again that has nothing to do with who put the car together on the production line. I love my current car from 2019. The interior has the right combination of physical buttons and screens and still has a proper engine w/o any hybrid BS that's complicating things. It's been a solid car over the last 7 years and the only problem is software/electronics related. Out of the blue it started to lose a couple of settings whenever its parked for a while, so every time I drive it, I first have to fix those settings. I have not found a solution. It's possible that the non-volatile storage has started to fail, so those settings don't save anymore and get lost. There isn't really any hope of fixing it, either, aside from starting to replace expensive hardware.

I put it this way. My wife's car is a 2004 VW with 56k miles. She doesn't drive much as you can see, so there hasn't really been a good reason to replace the car. It just works. Has no complicated electronics, weighs only a little over 3000 lbs and is a great car for just daily type of driving. I even use it for running errands around town when it's not worth firing up the AMG. It never really had any issues over the 22 years. The speakers have started to rattle and some of the interior plastic has degraded, but that's age. Just had the timing belt service done for the first time and it needed new lower control arms in the front, courtesy of the bad roads that we encounter at times and wife has driven through a few potholes over the years. I have not even the slightest expectation that my current AMG would last this long, and even less for what's coming out of the factories these days.

The good thing is that our lives were never dependent on a car. Neither of us daily drives. We are both working from home and back when we still had commutes, we commuted by train. I've always lived somewhere where I could take public transportation to work. We could live a car free live if we chose, but it's convenient to have a car at times, and I got to have my toys :-).

 

The New E and S don't have any more screens than a 222. In a 222 the gauges are a screen and a screen is required to operate all the multimedia...if the screens go out you are just as screwed, You can turn the temp up and down in a 222, but you wont know what the temp is set to.

Screens are actually very reliable.

 

Screens for 222 are very reliable.

Screens for newer cars where there is about half an acre of screen.... Issue isn't the screen itself (though I've seen a few of them that have failed) it is software and finicky electronics that interact with the screen that make for a black screen.

 

A good example is one of my coworkers who took delivery of a Tesla Model 3 a few years ago. Shortly after he left the delivery center in Fremont, the computer died and the screen went dark. Brand new car. He didn't even know how fast he was driving. The issue wasn't so much the screen, but that a single computer is handling all information display and it crapped out. While MBs have digital instrument clusters now, they for now at least still have a separate ECU responsible for the instrument cluster, so if the Infotainment system goes dark, the instrument cluster stays up. Redundancy is the name of the game. While Tesla has worked on centralizing many of the functions on a single ECU, if that ECU goes out, so does everything with it. That's not to say that analog clusters were truly analog. Those analog gauges were fed by digital signals from sensors around the car, so they could go out just as easily and stop displaying speed if there was an issue with the wheel speed sensor or a CANbus communication issue.

 

Screens are very reliable, full stop. The size of the screen isn't the issue. There are absolutely COMAND system failures that happen and brick screens in the 222 also.

Concern over screens is no reason to avoid replacing a 222 with a newer generation MB.

 

I could be wrong, but I think John was talking about how so many featuress require going through menus and sub menus in the screen, instead of physical buttons, in addition to reliability. And that's not to mention the "tacked on ipad" look of the first generation W223 screens. So glad the new W223 made so many positive aesthetic changes like ditching the tacked on screen and real buttons on the steering wheel.

 

I agree.

@OP: the E-Class vs S-Class question really depends on which generations you are comparing. If you are comparing the W222 era (2014–2020), then the S-Class was absolutely the superior product in overall build quality, refinement, and how the cabin is put together.
If you are comparing current 2025-2026 models, then I found the new E-Class interior to be put together much much much better than the 223 from the same years. The W223 has so many complaints about creaks, rattles, electronic glitches, and general cost-cutting feel for what is supposed to be the flagship of the brand. To me, it is easily one of the weakest S-Class generations since the W220.
Personally, if you already own and enjoy a W222, I would keep it and wait to see how the facelift evolves now. If mbenz improves the interior quality to something closer to W222 standards, then the facelift could a the car to consider over the current E-class.
Having said that, the 26' E-class is an impressive in a fully loaded context
Also, to your question, keep in mind that creaks and rattles aren't caused by the operators building the same car, it is caused by designers making very cheap parts and very cheap design decisions that even when the best operator in the plant put the cabin together would still lead to a bad cabin parts that rattles/creaks everywhere.
That has also been my experience. I rarely remember seeing complaints about W222 screen failures themselves. Meanwhile, there have been definitely some W223 complaints of full-blackout screens, frozen systems, or electronics acting stupidly. My 222 hasn't done that even once throughout the years.
Regardless of the root cause, maybe 48V sensitivity or not, or increased/complex module communication, the end result is the same.

Reading his post again, I also think that is what he meant, and I agree. The ipad design philosophy is was stupid also because it was touch only but combined with a lousy software. My main issue is not the implementation but the design, although I hate to touch the screen for everything. My Tesla was also my touchscreen-based, but Tesla’s software ecosystem is at least great, and much more cohesive because they know how to develop software. My brother has a 223 which he let me use when we visit with family, and I certainly feel handcuffed with the ipad screen, and he also agrees that my former 222, which he used to admire at that time and was a factor in buying himself an S now, felt much more like a true luxury sedan than his current 223. Most of my other current and former cars had rotary controllers or a better balance between physical controls and digital interfaces, and honestly I still prefer that approach and glad I can still enjoy that today. At minimum, if a car removes physical interaction almost entirely, then the software experience needs to be exceptional to justify it. While the facelift interior is still not perfect in my opinion, but aesthetically and ergonomically at least is looks much better than the tucked-ipad in the pre-facelift which should only exist in a c-class.

 

Styling preferences and reliability concerns are different things. There’s nothing controlled outside the screen on a 222 that is controlled inside the screen on a 223 or 214 other than the climate features, temp etc and the suspension height…if the head unit fails on a 222 you’re just as sunk as on a newer generation car. The physical buttons on a 222 are still electronic and you don’t know what features you are selecting without the screen anyways.

If the OP is considering going from a 222 to a 214 screen reliability isn’t a concern IMO is my point.

Would I trade a well cared for 2019 222 on a 214? No. Would I trade a well cared for 2019 222 on a 223…yes…and mine was a 2020. The size and finish differences would be the reasons I wouldn’t make that trade, not screen concerns.

 

I'm gonna say this is not universally and entirely true. The physical buttons in my current center console have their own indicator lights. I can tell from them what mode my suspension is in, if I turned off ECO start/stop etc. Also, since my car is an AMG, I can change drive mode related functions on the steering wheel and can see on small displays in the steering wheel what mode I'm in. In addition I can also see the drive mode in the instrument cluster. So if the main screen goes dead for some reason, I can still control and see this information. Having said that, the radio will probably go out and things like that, but drive functions and related information displays remain available. So again, it goes back to having redundancy and physical buttons for commonly used features along with LEDs on them to indicate if the function is on or not. I agree with you that if the main display is out, I can no longer see what temperature the climate control is set to and that's effectively an argument for why there should be a separate display for that as well. Although I would say being able to see the set temperature isn't all that important. If you are cold, just turn it up until it feels comfortable.

 

We're still talking about a very narrow set of things you can do vs not do, in any event if your screen goes out you're going to have to have it repaired regardless of which generation car you have.

I'm 110% in favor of NOT having everything in a screen, don't get me wrong I much preferred the balance of physical controls vs screen in my 222 vs my 223 but I wouldn't be worried about screen failure in the 223 and not worried with the 222. In fact I would rather have the wheel/controller interface vs a touchscreen in general.

 

Yes of course, if something breaks, you'll probably wanna get it fixed. But narrow is perhaps a matter of perspective. A car's focus is to drive it, so the main functions I typically use are related to driving. In fact I rarely ever use the Infotainment system when driving. The radio comes on automatically and plays music in the background and my climate control is all set to my preference. There's very little I actually do with the Infotainment system. I'm not even using it for navigation anymore since I have let my Mercedes me subscription run out. It's become a dumb display to mirror my phone to for the most part.

 

OP, I think the quick sum up would be... Once a flagship, always a flagship, the W222 is still at end of the day an S-Class and everything shows compared to say even a W214. The W214 is very nice yes and way closer to an S-Class than the W213 to the W222 but it is really still not an S-Class.

 

It’s very hard to go back when you are used to this caliber of a car.

If I did go cheaper I would get an SUV or an EV or something totally different just so I wasn’t always comparing them.

 

E Class is the Goldilocks of the Mercedes-Benz models to me . You get a decent comfort for both front and rear seats as well a Mercedes-Benz features at more an affordable price tag . However, I don't think that's a placebo thing , when I'm in an S Class, it feels like a different world . Rear seat comfort , leg room , design ethos are at higher levels and it's what it's supposed to be as S Class is the flagship and summit of the Mercedes-Benz

 

They certainly position the S Class as the flagship, but I don't think it's a secret that they took their eyes off the ball a bit with the W223. At least they appear to be course correcting with the FL. If anything, Mercedes does end up listening and try to turn things around. They've made some bad decisions in recent years across the board and are correcting them now. AMG is coming back with a brand new flat plane V8 and are most likely going to abandon the E Performance models. They've got the message that these cars are simply way too heavy and admit that a pure V8 with at most mild hybrid is the better approach. Apparently, they figured out a way to make it Euro 7 compliant. I guess when sales and profits are tanking, people get called to action.

 

Not only that they took their eyes off with the 223, it almost feels as if they have completely shelved it. The worst new launch since W220 in terms of quality and offering. I also agree about them attempting to patch it up with the facelift, but that front is still so boring with C/E class vibes (you see it around and it barely attracts you, even as a benz, unlike any other S). I see a W221 and W222 on the road today, and before I even try to recognize which model it is, there is some level of unique attraction that screams luxury. In fact, for the model years that OP is looking it for 25-26', right now the E is a better car than the S (better tech, phone as key, less creaks/rattles, better dash, and seems to be put together better). There are things in the pre-facelift S that I consider a big no go now no matter what. If OP can go for the facelift S, and work around the exterior lack of attraction, maybe but still need to confirm that the cabin quality isn't as bad as the pre-facelift.
Also agree about the excitement around the new V8; AMG is about to launch some great stuff soon too.

 

Yeah the E is a great vehicle. When I had that loaner I really did find myself asking "is my car really worth twice as much as this car?". Then you get back into the S Class and you no longer think that lol. The finish differences between the two are really clear...

I think thats absolutely true. I enjoy my 223 but theres no question the 222 was a better built car.

MB never wanted to make the AMG cars PHEV, they had to in order for them to be sellable in specific markets. Now that the M176 Evo is Euro 7 compliant they don't have to do that anymore.

Manufacturers don't do this stuff because they think we want it, they do it because they have to.

 

This is a fine argument for letting the market decide what is produced and sold!

Our friends in government/unelected idiots on a power trip with an agenda (We all must drive electric cars by X date among others) need to stick to reasonable safety and emissions regulations.

The market spoke clearly about battery electric power. Manufacturers got pinched when products produced to please regulators fell flat for all the reasons they did.

Owners will get pinched as they trade in cars subsidized when new that people are afraid to own (for good reason!) outside of warranty.

All the more reason to keep with my aging but still wonderful ICE powered car.