Category: Executive 
Price Range: £33,285 to £48,360
Quality cabin, high comfort levels, punchy 2.1-litre and 3.0-litre diesel engines.
Not very exciting to drive, limited headroom in rear seats, gloopy manual gearbox.
Lacks coupe-like road manners despite the Coupe tag - it's more of a comfortable cruiser.
There's an exhaustive list of active and passive safety kit to keep you out of trouble and help you to stay intact if you do.
Mercedes has carried out 100 tests and 17,000 computer simulated tests on the E-Class, on which the car is based, and says it is confident that the car's construction will stand up to high impacts very well. The numerous active safety systems should keep you out of trouble too and if they don't the car's structural integrity should remain intact.
Safety systems include stability control, adaptive braking with hill hold, Pre-Safe (a system that primes seat belts and other safety systems if it thinks an accident is imminent), crash responsive head restraints, attention assist (a system to alert the driver if it thinks he or she is drowsy), agility control and a total of nine airbags.
