Just got a new 2021 E53 AMG with distronic and I am not happy. Went on a 500KM highway drive yesterday and the cruise control wouldn't work for 300KM of it. It was lite rain and lite snow which can cause the "dirty radar sensor" to come on and kick the cruise control out. Also, as there were not a lot of cars on the highway, the cruise control would kick out as it apparently needs to have another car in front of it once in a while to verify the radar. If it doesn't detect another car it assumes there is a problem.

This is a big issue for me. The dealer said that Bosch (the company responsible for the system) is working on a software update to fix the need to have another car in front of once in a while due to lots of complaints. That isn't going to help with the "dirty radar sensor" issue though. My old Hyundai had better cruise control than this car. There should be someway to de-activate the adaptive cruise control. Very frustrating.

 

Not sure how different DISTRONIC is in the FL W213 compared to my FL C205 (2019), but I haven't experienced any of these issues. Sounds like they might have mucked something up. To be fair, radar doesn't like snow or even rain, and I rarely drive in wet conditions, courtesy of the dry climate here in California, but I have used DISTRONIC in a very heavy rainstorm while in Germany and I was amazed that it still worked. I actually had a hard time seeing the lane markers, so I activated the active steering assist to help me stay in the lane and it did a surprisingly good job. I've gotten the dirty sensor warning only once due to a battlefield of dead insects all over the front of the car, but scraping them off resolved the issue. Also, this is the first time I'm hearing that it needs to "see" a car periodically. It does make sense, but it has never caused DISTRONIC to deactivate on me. Maybe I just never drove on an empty enough road. I have to say, the assistance systems work quite well in my '19 C63S.

 

I have never experienced any of these issues either, and I've driven on some pretty empty roads (e.g. Hwy 402 between London and Windsor, ON). Can you quantify "...once in a while..."?

The only issue I've ever had is the entire system shut down due to (what I assume) was being parked to close to a barrier: on starting the car all adaptive systems shut down. It recovered fully once I restarted the car.

OTOH I wholeheartedly agree that there should be a "simple" cruise control mode that bypasses the sensors and just cruises like days of old.

Ivan MacKenzie.

 

Seems like about 15-20 minutes before it shuts down cruise control. Then when I catch up to another car it takes about 1 minute to become avaiable again.

 

I had problems with my adaptive cruise and lane following assist when the car was delivered to the States following my European Delivery tour. The cars windshield had to be replaced due to a pebble that cracked the windshield on the last day of the trip

When I left the dealership in Germantown to begin my drive back home to California all sorts of alarms started coming up about the various Distronic features. Basically anything that relied on the cameras. Since that time I've come to the conclusion that the VPC replaced the windshield with the wrong model given all the options I had on my car.

Due to yet another rock strike outside Little Rock - a misnomer because it was quite a large rock that destroyed the windshield - I had the windshield replaced again in Dallas with the right model. They recalibrated everything and the Distronic features have been working fine since.

One one other time have I had a message pop up about the cruise or anything else like that. Cleaned off the front end of the car (which was not that dirty) at my next gas stop and never had any more issues.

Like another poster, I live in So Cal so the car doesn't see much rain or road grime being thrown up on the car from other vehicles. But it did rain much of the two weeks we were on our vacation in Germany with the car and it performed flawlessly with no error messages.

 

I’ve got the “dirty radar sensor” in the rain on all my MB cars in the past. Not all the time but it has happened. Especially if it’s raining hard.