Just did a 1500 mile trip in the Wagon
05-03-2018, 04:26 PM
#1
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2018 S560 and 2019 E450 Wagon.
Just did a 1500 mile trip in the Wagon
The car drove great, really like the self driving features, it tracks the lanes well, much better than my 2015 S550 does, they have come a long ways with the distronic the past few years. I do notice, I'm sure has aways been the case the brakes get much more use and a workout when using the Distronic, I'm sure pads are not going to last as long in using adaptive cruise as much as I do. I also notice fuel mileage is about 2 mpg lower when using Distronic. I seemed to be averaging around 22 mpg at 75 mph when using it and around 24 mpg when not using it.
I was playing around with the GPS quite a bit trying to figure out how to get a text display of the directions entered into the GPS to see what route it was taking me as I could do in my last 2012 E63 AMG, could not for the life of me figure out how to do this. I thought it would be under route and position. I finally called tech support at Benz and turns out this feature has been removed for the 2018's I guess too many people trying to read screens as they drove, so I can understand this, it could be dangerous.
I started really noticing all the bumps in the roads as I got north. I will say though the ride is not all that bad, firm, yes, but solid and does not really bother me all that much. My Chevy Truck which I drove last night rides much worse than my E63 Wagon.
All in all very good and comfortable and uneventful trip. I am finally really adjusting to this car and it seems the more I drive it, the more I like it.
I was playing around with the GPS quite a bit trying to figure out how to get a text display of the directions entered into the GPS to see what route it was taking me as I could do in my last 2012 E63 AMG, could not for the life of me figure out how to do this. I thought it would be under route and position. I finally called tech support at Benz and turns out this feature has been removed for the 2018's I guess too many people trying to read screens as they drove, so I can understand this, it could be dangerous.
I started really noticing all the bumps in the roads as I got north. I will say though the ride is not all that bad, firm, yes, but solid and does not really bother me all that much. My Chevy Truck which I drove last night rides much worse than my E63 Wagon.
All in all very good and comfortable and uneventful trip. I am finally really adjusting to this car and it seems the more I drive it, the more I like it.
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05-03-2018, 07:18 PM
#2
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I noticed as well that the mileage was lower when using the Distronic than when I drive the car.
The 4 cylinder deactivation mode doesn't seem to engage when Distronic is active, nor does glide mode.
Given the cameras on board you'd think the car could do a better job of seeing traffic ahead and lifting the throttle earlier to coast down to match the speed of the slower traffic ahead. Instead it happily continues along until the radar senses the car ahead and then brakes - sometimes fairly hard. Even my 16 year old daughter figured out in her first couple of driving lessons how to smoothly adjust speed for the traffic ahead without braking too often.
One other thing that seemed to happen mostly in Texas on my trip was that the car would pick up the speed limit signs for some of the frontage roads that parallel the Interstate. You would be humming along on a section with an 80 MPH limit with the CC set to say 89 MPH and then the car would brake hard and reset the CC to 35 MPH.
Really lucky that there was never anyone close behind me as the car certainly slowed down quickly enough to result in a rear end collision if a car had been following and not paying attention. I was really tempted to just turn off the speed sign sensing feature.
Still, by and large the Distronic is a very nice upgrade from the dumb cruise controls I have in other cars.
The 4 cylinder deactivation mode doesn't seem to engage when Distronic is active, nor does glide mode.
Given the cameras on board you'd think the car could do a better job of seeing traffic ahead and lifting the throttle earlier to coast down to match the speed of the slower traffic ahead. Instead it happily continues along until the radar senses the car ahead and then brakes - sometimes fairly hard. Even my 16 year old daughter figured out in her first couple of driving lessons how to smoothly adjust speed for the traffic ahead without braking too often.
One other thing that seemed to happen mostly in Texas on my trip was that the car would pick up the speed limit signs for some of the frontage roads that parallel the Interstate. You would be humming along on a section with an 80 MPH limit with the CC set to say 89 MPH and then the car would brake hard and reset the CC to 35 MPH.
Really lucky that there was never anyone close behind me as the car certainly slowed down quickly enough to result in a rear end collision if a car had been following and not paying attention. I was really tempted to just turn off the speed sign sensing feature.
Still, by and large the Distronic is a very nice upgrade from the dumb cruise controls I have in other cars.
05-03-2018, 09:49 PM
#3
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Yes, I do like the Distronic and is better than my 2015 S class cruise. Yes, that was one of the first things I did was turn off the speed limit adoption, I really was not breaking speed limits anyhow so it was not much of a factor. With it on that fast slowing down can really catch you off guard and could cause an accident. I was so eager originally to activate that feature now I'm so eager to turn it off and leave it off, lol. I took the long way the last day from Maryland to Wilkes Barre along I81 into I84 and into CT. I've seen some really bad potholes in the past along 95 into NY on the other side of the GW bridge so I was not gonna take any chances of blowing out a sidewall or bending a rim. The good thing with that route was I stopped in at Orange Country Choppers to check that place out. The show is coming back May 28th they were telling me.
05-08-2018, 02:39 AM
#4
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I noticed as well that the mileage was lower when using the Distronic than when I drive the car.
The 4 cylinder deactivation mode doesn't seem to engage when Distronic is active, nor does glide mode.
Given the cameras on board you'd think the car could do a better job of seeing traffic ahead and lifting the throttle earlier to coast down to match the speed of the slower traffic ahead. Instead it happily continues along until the radar senses the car ahead and then brakes - sometimes fairly hard. Even my 16 year old daughter figured out in her first couple of driving lessons how to smoothly adjust speed for the traffic ahead without braking too often.
One other thing that seemed to happen mostly in Texas on my trip was that the car would pick up the speed limit signs for some of the frontage roads that parallel the Interstate. You would be humming along on a section with an 80 MPH limit with the CC set to say 89 MPH and then the car would brake hard and reset the CC to 35 MPH.
Really lucky that there was never anyone close behind me as the car certainly slowed down quickly enough to result in a rear end collision if a car had been following and not paying attention. I was really tempted to just turn off the speed sign sensing feature.
Still, by and large the Distronic is a very nice upgrade from the dumb cruise controls I have in other cars.
The 4 cylinder deactivation mode doesn't seem to engage when Distronic is active, nor does glide mode.
Given the cameras on board you'd think the car could do a better job of seeing traffic ahead and lifting the throttle earlier to coast down to match the speed of the slower traffic ahead. Instead it happily continues along until the radar senses the car ahead and then brakes - sometimes fairly hard. Even my 16 year old daughter figured out in her first couple of driving lessons how to smoothly adjust speed for the traffic ahead without braking too often.
One other thing that seemed to happen mostly in Texas on my trip was that the car would pick up the speed limit signs for some of the frontage roads that parallel the Interstate. You would be humming along on a section with an 80 MPH limit with the CC set to say 89 MPH and then the car would brake hard and reset the CC to 35 MPH.
Really lucky that there was never anyone close behind me as the car certainly slowed down quickly enough to result in a rear end collision if a car had been following and not paying attention. I was really tempted to just turn off the speed sign sensing feature.
Still, by and large the Distronic is a very nice upgrade from the dumb cruise controls I have in other cars.
05-08-2018, 02:54 AM
#5
Member
The car drove great, really like the self driving features, it tracks the lanes well, much better than my 2015 S550 does, they have come a long ways with the distronic the past few years. I do notice, I'm sure has aways been the case the brakes get much more use and a workout when using the Distronic, I'm sure pads are not going to last as long in using adaptive cruise as much as I do. I also notice fuel mileage is about 2 mpg lower when using Distronic. I seemed to be averaging around 22 mpg at 75 mph when using it and around 24 mpg when not using it.
I was playing around with the GPS quite a bit trying to figure out how to get a text display of the directions entered into the GPS to see what route it was taking me as I could do in my last 2012 E63 AMG, could not for the life of me figure out how to do this. I thought it would be under route and position. I finally called tech support at Benz and turns out this feature has been removed for the 2018's I guess too many people trying to read screens as they drove, so I can understand this, it could be dangerous.
I started really noticing all the bumps in the roads as I got north. I will say though the ride is not all that bad, firm, yes, but solid and does not really bother me all that much. My Chevy Truck which I drove last night rides much worse than my E63 Wagon.
All in all very good and comfortable and uneventful trip. I am finally really adjusting to this car and it seems the more I drive it, the more I like it.
I was playing around with the GPS quite a bit trying to figure out how to get a text display of the directions entered into the GPS to see what route it was taking me as I could do in my last 2012 E63 AMG, could not for the life of me figure out how to do this. I thought it would be under route and position. I finally called tech support at Benz and turns out this feature has been removed for the 2018's I guess too many people trying to read screens as they drove, so I can understand this, it could be dangerous.
I started really noticing all the bumps in the roads as I got north. I will say though the ride is not all that bad, firm, yes, but solid and does not really bother me all that much. My Chevy Truck which I drove last night rides much worse than my E63 Wagon.
All in all very good and comfortable and uneventful trip. I am finally really adjusting to this car and it seems the more I drive it, the more I like it.
I hate it when humanity starts designing systems for the failure cases at the expense of the mainstream cases: let’s remove a feature at the expense of 99% of the people who find it useful because for the remaining 1% of the users it may be confusing. Let’s punish everybody else while pleasing the weak link. This is regression not progression.
05-08-2018, 06:23 AM
#6
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Not having an option to display the street directions/sequence to your destination is a big miss in my book. I had a 2002 Acura TL which not only displayed the street sequence to your destination but also allowed you to remove some of those streets/freeways/etc and the system would recalculate a new route without those streets. It was very smart and useful. An AMG specialist from the dealership confirmed the lack of this feature in our 2018 model.
I hate it when humanity starts designing systems for the failure cases at the expense of the mainstream cases: let’s remove a feature at the expense of 99% of the people who find it useful because for the remaining 1% of the users it may be confusing. Let’s punish everybody else while pleasing the weak link. This is regression not progression.
05-14-2018, 11:28 AM
#7
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Cylinder deactivation works with cruise control engaged but you must have the “start on/off” button activated. If you do, you’ll see the 8-cylinder sign lit up on your dashboard and then watch it change to the 4-cylinder icon when automatic cylinder deactivation is engaged.
If I engaged the CC while the 4-cylinder icon was on, it would remain on until I hit a slight up hill. But once off, it would never come back on - even when heading down hill.
Switch CC back off at the same stretch of road and condition where I expected that the 4-cylinder deactivation should have triggered and presto, it turned right on in manual mode.
Tried this several times under different scenarios, each time it would work in manual mode but not in cruise control mode. Similarly, the glide mode never activates with CC enabled that I could tell. It regularly engages in manual mode.
Now this was driving up and down a stretch of highway from San Diego past Temecula where you run up and over several fairly substantial hills - they would probably be considered mountains on the east coast ;-). Allowing the car to glide down the hills a bit or at least entering 4-cylinder mode would help save a bit of fuel.
Watching the consumption meter, it looked like I was doing better on fuel in manual mode than cruise. I'd have to run the route a time or two in manual and again with CC enabled to average out the results and confirm.
The problem with running in manual mode is that it's too easy to take advantage of chances to roll on the throttle a bit here and there, canceling out any gains made over the CC mode.
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05-14-2018, 11:41 AM
#8
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The biggest expense I see with running on Distronic is gonna be brakes. It beats the hell out of the brakes a lot more than I ever would driving the car manually. That may be why on carfax when looking at used AMG's I see a lot of cars having brake jobs done at like 20K miles and that kind of thing. I know on my 2012 AMG I drove mostly manually and got 55K out of my brake pads and when I got rid of the car then it was showing signs of need brakes soon. I'll be happy if I can get 55K miles out of the brakes on tis car.
As far as the display of routing, yes I think this is a big mistake they are making. I really like to know what route I am being taken on when I hit something into the GPS. They could have at least allowed it to be displayed only when stopped or something like that if it was safety they were concerned with as they told me at Mercedes customer service when I called them. I believe it's not just on the AMG's they are doing this but on the full line of mercedes cars. Somebody must have crashed or something looking at their route directions as they drove.
As far as the display of routing, yes I think this is a big mistake they are making. I really like to know what route I am being taken on when I hit something into the GPS. They could have at least allowed it to be displayed only when stopped or something like that if it was safety they were concerned with as they told me at Mercedes customer service when I called them. I believe it's not just on the AMG's they are doing this but on the full line of mercedes cars. Somebody must have crashed or something looking at their route directions as they drove.
