Mercedes Benz Sound 4000 Manual
It earns an overall score of 8.3 on our rating scale. (.) The 2018 E-Class starts to rack up points with handsome profiles on all its shapes. The short-trunk, long-hood proportions correct past grievances.
The E-Class looks distinct-ish from the C-Class and S-Class, and hasn’t lost a bit of the beef or bulk that lets it shoulder some of its rivals aside. Ascend into AMG heights, and the bodies get lower, the trim darker, the wheels bigger, the badges more numerous. The cabin’s an effusive place banded with foot-wide high-resolution displays and glossy wood or metallic trim (or both) and a suave set of round air vents. The screens depend on a futzy knob/pad controller on the console, but a more friendly Android or Apple interface pops up when you plug in. Performance comes from gasoline, no more of the electric or diesel sideshows. The base 241-hp turbo-4 provides the E300 with 6-second oomph and available all-wheel drive; we recommend the air dampers for their all-around talent.
E400 Benzes sport a 329-hp twin-turbo V-6 and all-wheel drive. Drive modes and adaptive suspensions and tunable steering give all these E-Class variants a confident, but never abrasive, set of road manners. You want abrasive? Take an AMG E43 or E 63 S for a spin, and roll it into Sport+ mode. The shifts bang home, the twin-turbos light with a hissing fury, the AWD system shuffles power to the rear--it’s your problem now, guy--and the entire car gels into something that nothing the size of an E-Class should be able to become. At more than 4,000 pounds and 190-plus inches long, the AMG Es are a rollicking reminder that today’s Mercedes cars often perform better, much better, than the old Bavarian benchmark brands.
Bigger inside, divinely useful as a wagon, trunk-hampered as a Cabriolet, the E-Class offers up lush cabinetry on pricey models and ladles full of transistors in the search for safety. It’s a perfect crash-tester, with leading Level 2 semi-autonomous driving capability that lets it changes lanes for itself and swerve out of the way of oncoming traffic. Other features we want include the in-car fragrance dispenser, for a few hundred dollars; the 64-color ambient lighting, free on most models; and for more than $6,000 the Burmester sound system, with its crystal clear sound and carved-metal speaker grilles. The E-Class could easily have backed off on dramatic styling change. It's embraced the long-nose, short-deck sweep that's recast the C-Class and S-Class as the most stylish cars in their respective classes. We're giving it an 8 for styling, with points for both the exterior and interior, and an extra for either the lavish dash or the subtle roofline, take your pick.
(.) The family now includes wagons, coupes, and cabriolets as well as sedans, all of them attractive in their own right. On the sedans, the silhouette remains the same regardless of drivetrain. There's a tapered shoulder line that pulls down toward the rear wheels, a carefully draped roofline that flows into the abbreviated rear end. At the back, LED taillights have a diffused pattern dubbed by Benz as a 'stardust' effect.
It's not as complex as Rolls-Royce's starlight roof, with its thousands of pinpoints of LED light, but it's a charming detail, one of dozens that set this generation of Mercedes cars well apart from those in the past. Coupes and cabriolets lose a pair of doors and some ride height. The idea’s the same, but on these models, the front and rear windows tuck into the body framelessly. The span of glass behind the door is so large, designers had to adopt a thin mini-pillar that cuts the rear side windows into two-third and one-third segments.
It’s not beautiful, but in total the coupe and cabriolet design is. The effusive design cues carry into the cabin. The E-Class interior is no longer bound by big bands of wood and studded by banks of buttons.
It's swept up into a rhythm of textures, from open-pore woods to metallic weaves, that rise and ebb from the door panels toward a bombe chest of a center console. It's all capped in stitched leather and warmed by 64 shades of ambient lighting from prom-night purple to old-money white.
On less expensive sedans, a pair of conventional gauges faces the driver, next to a 12.3-inch center display. On most other models, a second 12.3-inch display takes the place of gauges, as the E-Class doubles down on those wide-aspect screens. The right high-tech mood set, the E-Class fills its cabin with the soft glow of electronica--while it strands some information behind the steering wheel, no matter how the wheel is positioned. With information crammed in the corners of the display, it's as if the car would be better off without a steering wheel at all. The cockpit's receptive to fingertip control.