I can confirm this myself too.
During the early days after taking ownership, sometimes my passengers would approach the car faster than me and they complained that doors are still locked (despite the handles are extended). It was only after I got closer to the driver door (and the handle) that the doors are actually unlocked.

Left keys in car this evening for 2 hrs. Handles always have popped out before when I touched door handle. Tonight they would not open. Stayed retracted. Had to go back in house for spare key

I assume you tried swiping your hand across handle? (usually from left to right)

This swipey thing works maybe 1/15 times lol

Odd. Works every single time for me.

yeah, tried everything I always do but it didn’t open last night. Odd. Not sure if leaving keys in car for almost 3 hours messed up the system. Will troubleshoot it by doing same thing today.

I brought this up before: A W233 is involved in a major accident. The occupants are injured, perhaps unconscious. Perhaps gasoline is leaking. The door handles don’t pop out. In the first seconds after the crash, bystanders are trying to get the doors open, but can’t. Now what?

Door handles are something that need to work FLAWLESSLY 100% of the time. They need to be intuitive and easily operable by ANYONE, even someone who has never set eyes on a W223 before. MB has absolutely, positively FAILED “Door Handles 101.” They had PERFECT handles and just had to “improve” them.

If I have to guess, I would think this is by design instead of having a bug.
This is probably a security measure to make the car locked if an absent minded driver leaves the car in a public parking lot and goes away for a longer period.
So, there is probably a certain time limit (as in your case, maybe it is 2 or 3 hours) that will trigger this locking which has to be unlocked with the spare key.

Frankly, the User Manual really needs to be written well, to cover in details of every single feature of the car, and in understandable English.

Should be a CARDINAL RULE!
But knowing MB and their consciousness with safety I bet the door handles pop out under emergency circumstances; just like an accident triggers MANY automatic actions by the car.

I leave the car unlocked in my garage all the time (and take the key fob). Never once locked automatically after period of time. Nor would I want it to!

The handles are so unreliable under perfect conditions, that I’m afraid I’m not very confident that any emergency system will prove to be more reliable.

Pitiful is all I can say. Just pitiful.

I totally agree. It is an embarrassment for the company. The tech engineers must have been on drugs to allow these simple operations to be such a failure. I'll never be behind the wheel of a W223 but I still like to voice my thoughts on it.

Possible reason: if the car is reasonably close to the fob, which may be in your pocket, even if you are in the house and the car is in the garage, it senses you are nearby. Rather than lock and unlock every time you pass “near” the car, once the fob comes near it the second time it stays “locked” requiring a manual press of the square followed by a horizontal handle swipe OR a press on your fob to unlock. Once I understood it, I found it really makes sense and works flawlessly.

I hope your situation is just that issue and nothing more.

I'm thinking you're on the right track; a guess, but not without basis: I attended an AMA set up by a car club involving a local boy made good; he was an engineer working in NVH at GM and at the time visiting relatives back in his home town. Some of you may recall GM introduced one of the first keyless entry systems and it most definitely came up in the AMA because that system locked the car when you got out and some didn't like the concept. In any event it wasn't his area but he did discuss some of the things they had to overcome; power strategy, security, and so on. They had wanted to keep the car "alive" for brief periods after you got out so the systems would boot quickly when you got back in the car but this was causing battery drain when the key was in close proximity for extended periods. Various strategies failed until they eventually solved the problem by not solving it, they simply made the car lock after exit and put the complete shut down on a timer triggered by the lock.

So looking at it from a design standpoint, it isn't hard to imagine an engineer wanting to shut the car down for security reasons as you mentioned, but also to preserve battery. When you think about it the car doesn't know when you're coming back to your unlocked car with the fob in it, could be 2 hours, could be 2 days, but someone had to make a decision about what to do in the situation. I'm pretty confident the locking was not an accident for those reasons.

About those handles; to my knowledge, all cars with keyless unlock directly in the aftermath of an accident and have from the first system. On this particular system the manual tells me the car uses post collision automatic braking, activates the hazard lights, triggers an emergency call, switches off the engine, shuts off the fuel, unlocks the car, pops the handles, lowers the side windows, and displays an emergency manual in the center screen. Seems to me like someone was thinking about accident safety...

Interestingly, my experience has been the same. Worked every time the first couple of weeks, now they almost never pop out as I approach the car. If they don’t pop out on their own, swiping on the door handle works about half the time, the other half I have to dig out the key and use it to open the car. Just another idiotic “feature” that was half-assed. Honestly, I would be just as pissed off if all these problems existed in a $25K Hyundai. New cars are supposed to be flawless or close to it. I bet those $25K Hyundais are.