2013 Mercedes-Benz GL350 BlueTec – Review and Road Test – The Green Car Driver –

The Mercedes-Benz GL350 BlueTec has a lot going for it. It hides its bulk, seems to return to Mercedes’ obsessive levels of over engineering, is rewarding to drive and had enough space to satisfy six of my friends or fit an 8-foot couch in the back (I measured). I had a feeling of invincibility, due to a combination of the fumes coming from the infinitely adjustable leather seats and the myriad safety systems and driver aids, and joked to myself that crashing the GL would require a significant amount of effort .Blind spots are monitored, the car will vibrate the steering wheel should you drift from your lane and even apply the brakes on once side should you cross the center divider, all while the cruise control maintains a safe following distance from the car in front of you, even down to stop and go traffic (I verified this personally, and only had a mild heart attack as the car ground to a halt in front of Saint John’s Town Center in Jacksonville).

The new GL had even more luxury, technology and safety features than its predecessor, which it ought to since it costs a good deal more too. The Designo leather seats were plush (yes plush!), diamond-quilted, heated, cooled, multi-contour and massaging. Everything in the car is operated at the push of a button, down to the second row headrests dropping themselves before the seats flip up and out of the way to grant access to the power-operated third row. The high beams are automatic, and operate smoothly, and the car not only scans for parallel parking spots large enough for the car, but will park itself, too (my test car only curbed its rims twice). The active damping system provides  for fun on onramps, and the Bang & Olufsen sound system introduced me to a whole new dimension of music, and having experienced it will likely cost me quite a bit of money in the future.

360º camera gives a great show at the car wash

In addition to airbags and radar sensors (which I learned do not set off my V1 radar detector, just those of everybody around me) the car is surrounded by cameras, which are assembled together and show you the car from overhead (although I could not see myself)), along with guidelines of where your tires are going, where they can go, and what you are about to run over. Unfortunately, it is greyed out while you’re driving (as is Facebook), and it really shouldn’t be, since the car will stop for me, drive itself back into the lane or if all goes wrong, vibrate my steering wheel, and beep at me to pay attention again.

GL-CLASS INFOTAINMENT AND TECH

After a day or two with the GL, I had renewed faith in Mercedes, and I was even  somewhat disappointed that I would have no reason to make fun of the Tuscaloosa build quality to my uncle, who proudly hails from the region. Once my high from the Designo leather and B&O sound wore off, as did the seduction techniques programmed into the seat massage, several friends and I started to notice some things that didn’t quite suit the GL’s new $100,000 price point.

COMAND. Mercedes calls their multi-media infotainment system Comand, since through it, you tell the car to do things, be it the radio station you want, whom you want to call, or how you want to be massaged. The in-dash display is controlled mostly by a selector knob in front of the armrest, and then a somewhat related multi-function display in the instrument cluster is controlled separately by a button pad on the steering wheel. While they can both show much the same information, and control the telephone, navigation and sound systems, I found that doing so was quite difficult and it was more distracting to use the steering wheel controls than to simply go through Comand, especially since I had to keep the vehicle’s speed on this display, as the gauges are difficult to read, are offset compared to most other vehicles, and have a variable scale, making it harder to see that I was speeding. Also, compared to a GPS-verified speed, the car underestimates its speed by one to two mph, which was a surprise.

The controller that Mercedes uses to operate Comand is surrounded by four buttons: Back and Clear (which seem redundant to me, but I quickly trained myself to cope with), a star icon (which you can program for a specific feature) and a picture of a seat (for controlling the many seat functions). The latter is particularly useful, since it is a multi-step process to turn on the seat massagers each time you start the car. Although I found a lot of the systems to be unintuitive to my ways of thinking (which are not universal and affected by my own stubbornness, undoubtedly) It’s also missing Night Vision and Head-Up Display, which it’s closest competitors have, and for $100k, there is no reason the GL shouldn’t have them too.

NANNIES. Since the GL has the same attention span and behavioral problems as many of the children that typically occupy it, there are a lot of nannies to keep it in line. Distronic makes  sure the GL keeps a safe distance from the car in front of it, but it changes speed abruptly, unlike the automatic high beams, which transition from low to high beams smoothly, unlike the shutter action that every other xenon-headlamp equipped car I have ever driven uses. Although I got used to the Distronic and was able to reduce the yank-and-bank changes in speed, the minimum closest following distance is considered by most Ohio residents as me yielding to them and telling them to move right on over, in which case the car would slow down further, and I would be stuck behind somebody doing 10 under the speed limit in the left lane until the massage cycle ended, and I would finally pass on the right.

It’s also not terribly well suited to more competitive driving environments, especially considering the full three-second delay between hitting the gas and the car pushing you back in the seat, which I timed more than once while on I-75/I-85 in Midtown Atlanta.

The last nanny is the DVD system, which because of the excellent Bang & Olufsen sound system I could potentially rationalize having chosen over an iPad for each rear passenger. What continues to astound me, however, is that there is no HDMI input or wireless streaming feature (which B&O has almost completely switched to) for video. The critical issue, however, was that even after 30 minutes spent in front of my house, I was unable to make the contents of the front DVD changer, which would play on the Comand screen while parked and via the B&O speakers play on the rear screens, nor could I make the sound from the rear DVD drive play via anything other than the systems headphones. This will hopefully improve, since it already won me over from my usual stance that built-in rear entertainment systems are a waste.

Click here to continue to Page 3 – Driving the Mercedes-Benz GL350 BlueTec

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