Category: Executive 
Price Range: £29,324 to £68,409
Comfort, road behaviour, safety, intelligently thought-out, overall quality, spacious load bay.
Cost (especially when adding from a long list of options), ride quality in town, patrician image.
Now back on track, the E-Class's numerous changes should win back the Merc faithful.
Mercedes has been busy.
In refreshing its E-Class - a successful model that has been around in one form or another since the 190 Ponton was launched in 1953 - it has made 2,000 technical changes. Much of this work has been in an attempt to win over those customers who had been disillusioned by the reputation it had gained for unreliability. This was most obviously manifested in the previous version's electronics, which had blotted the car's copybook and seen some of the Merc faithful turn to its German competitors and the upstart Lexus.
Despite a few technical problems and a competitive marketplace, the previous E-Class range managed to sell around a million cars worldwide - 860,000 saloons and 140,000 estates - since its debut in 2002. In the UK, 49,000 saloons have been sold since 2002, with 18,500 estates since 2003.
The latest E has a number of innovative features among its 2,000 changes, including Mercedes's new intelligent lighting system, which it claims is a world first. It also comes with a number of safety features and a mass of information systems.
The engine line-up comprises the supercharged E 200K, normally aspirated E 280, E 350, E 500, and E 63 AMG petrol versions, or E 220 CDI, E 280 CDI and E 320 CDI diesels.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Mercedes E-Class Estate
wrote on 05 10 2007