2024 Mercedes-Benz E350 Review: An Expensive Cure for Motion Sickness

What’s luxury to you? Is it an abundance of tech, maybe a special screen just for the passenger? Really comfortable seats? Gigantic wheels? The 2024 Mercedes-Benz E350 4Matic has all of those things because of course it does—but so do cars half the price of this $83,400-as-tested sedan. Spending a week with this one exploring the Pacific Northwest helped me settle upon my own answer to that question: a dumb comfy ride that might eliminate chronic motion sickness. And that’s something you can’t just get anywhere.

The Basics

The Mercedes-Benz E-Class is all new for 2024 and comes in two varieties: the E350 that starts at $63,450 and is powered by a 2.0-liter turbocharged inline four-cylinder and the E450 that starts at $69,250 and packs a 3.0-liter inline-six, again turbocharged. Both are all-wheel-drive and employ a nine-speed auto and 48-volt mild hybrid system, but the difference in output between them is rather stark: 255 horsepower and 295 lb-ft for the four-cylinder, and 375 hp and 369 lb-ft for the six.

My tester was the E350, though you probably wouldn’t have guessed that from the outside. It looked like just about the priciest E-Class you could option this side of the AMG realm and honestly wasn’t very far off, with its 21-inch wheels that tacked on $3,050 to the invoice. The E350 may be a relatively humble midsize luxury sedan, but when it’s wearing wheels that large, it kind of makes you feel like you’ve shrunk.

They look good, though, and the E-Class looks better with them. I have very little to say about the Merc’s exterior design, other than that I don’t actually mind the smoothed pebble look the brand’s gone for in recent years. It’s a tasteful foil to whatever in the not-so-fresh hell BMW’s been doing for far too long. The repeating Silver Arrows graphic in the LED tails is a nice touch worth a callout.

Inside, the E350 certainly makes more of an impression, with an unbroken vent motif that wraps around the edges of the dash, evoking the brake lights of the old Maserati 4200GT. That’s where my mind went, anyway. There’s plenty more to cover here from a usability standpoint, but if we’re talking pure aesthetics, I loved the way the silver “fabric” (it’s plastic) accents played against the Tonka Brown Nappa leather upholstery. After ages of piano black and carbon fiber everything, it’s nice to see silver en vogue again. The 2000s really are making a comeback.

Driving the Mercedes-Benz E350

A big, cushy sedan like the E350 has to do two things: swallow interstate miles by the dozens, and be comfortable doing it. I logged more than 1,000 miles in this thing, starting in Seattle before cruising up through the Olympic Peninsula and down the Oregon coast, and I can’t imagine they would’ve been more pleasant in anything else. It turns out 255 hp, coupled with that hybrid torque boost from a standstill, is totally sufficient for a sedan that weighs about 4,200 pounds and measures 195 inches long. Nobody needs the three-liter, though, when the difference in price between the two is a mere six grand, I understand the temptation.

Yeah, the brake pedal was a smidge too soft for my liking, but then “soft” is how a car like this is designed to make you feel. Ultimately, the E-Class’ real calling card is comfort. It’s decently maneuverable at low speeds, thanks to a very quick rack and optional rear-wheel steering, but what truly matters in a vehicle like this is your ability to corner without making your passenger feel their stomach drop.

Now, I’m not exaggerating when I say that my partner gets sick in literally every car. Naturally, I had some reservations about our Pacific Northwest road trip, especially considering that the roads we’d be blazing down would be anything but straight and flat. And yet, despite the many hours she spent riding shotgun, the E350’s Airmatic suspension, with four-wheel level control and active damping—a $3,200 add-on, for those keeping score at home—completely neutralized the threat of motion sickness. Turns out Airmatic is like really high-tech Dramamine, and frankly, I can’t think of a better endorsement for a luxury sedan’s ride.

The Highs and Lows

That suspension is the E350’s party piece, but it has other strong points. The engine’s auto stop-start function is so smooth, and the motor itself so quiet, that half the time I wouldn’t realize it actually kicked off until the climate vents started blowing slightly warmer air in my face.

The Burmeister 4D audio system—a $1,030 option itself or $3,400 as part of the Pinnacle Trim—with its 17 speakers doesn’t miss, conveying both the B-movie slasher strings and swampy, booming bass synth of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” alike, in perfect clarity. Mercedes says this system integrates multiple subwoofers into the body’s structure, but they may as well be stuffed into the front seats. The trunk swallowed our carry-on luggage, backpacks, and large suitcase with ease, and rear passenger legroom is generous, too.

The only areas in which the new E-Class miss pertains to tech and infotainment. Like practically everything else in this segment, all of the sedan’s major functions are routed through the touchscreen, even the climate controls. If Merc designed its interface with a little more savviness, it would have placed critical functions, like temperature and vent adjustments within fewer taps of the big central touchscreen. Unfortunately, that’s just not how these brands fly.

It’s also jarring that despite all of the MBUX platform’s advancements, Mercedes still insists on a Microsoft Sam-esque voice model for its digital assistant. That makes the system’s random interjections—like when, out of nowhere, it said to me “I am sure that you are familiar with the birds and the bees”—all the more disconcerting.

The steering wheel controls mix a combination of vague presses and mostly capacitive swipes. It’s not the worst system of this kind I’ve encountered in a car—that handily goes to Volkswagen’s, which annoyingly tends to register the sides of your palms as input. But it’s still somewhat imprecise and doesn’t come naturally, and when you’re paying upwards of $80K for a vehicle like this, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for some honest-to-god buttons and scroll wheels. Ditto for the seat adjustment controls.

What else? Merc’s lane keep assist logic is far too sensitive, and doesn’t so much as coax you back to a central point as jerk the wheel—something I didn’t appreciate thousands of feet into ascending Mount Rainier. That got turned off rather quickly. And nobody needs the $1,500 MBUX “Superscreen,” which supplements the main 14.4-inch display with another 12.3-inch panel for the passenger. It can do most of the same things as the main screen but also stream YouTube and run basic mobile games, which might be attractive if you’ve never heard of an iPad before.

Mercedes-Benz E350 Features, Options, and Competition

You can expect a top-of-the-line E350 like this one to add nearly $20K onto the sedan’s $63,450 base price. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but it becomes relatively easy to trim the fat when you learn some of where that expense is coming from.

We’d be here until tomorrow if I went through every single one of my sedan’s options, but consider that those 21-inch wheels are $3,050; the Driver Assistance Package (with that pesky lane keep assist and various other active measures) another $1,950; the “Digital Lights” (Silver Arrows-speak for advanced headlights that steer) $990. The aforementioned passenger screen ruins the look of the otherwise pretty dash anyway, which comes in much nicer materials if you forgo that option. So there are indeed perks to keeping things relatively cheap.

So here’s what I’d do. Sacrilegious though some readers of The Drive may find it, keep the base engine—it’s potent enough for a car like this, and very solid on gas, as we’ll soon discuss. You and everyone you chauffeur will thank you for dropping $3,200 on the Airmatic suspension, so obviously do that, and the good sound system for $1,030 is actually really quite reasonable. The rest, frankly, I could take or leave on the whole. And there’s most of what makes this car great for under the $70K mark, affording you a little wiggle room to splurge on nice trim, like a certain exterior color or dash in natural brown maple wood, my personal preference.

The natural comparison to the E350 is the BMW 530i, though the base 5er is rear-wheel drive and starts at $58,895 delivered. It matches the E350 perfectly on power and torque, and if you want all-wheel drive, it’ll cost you $61,195. (Rumor has it Mercedes is prepping a rear-wheel-drive E350 for 2025, though with yearly price increases, don’t expect it to be cheaper than the current model.) The least expensive Audi A6 will set you back $59,790 with all-wheel drive and slightly more power than its local rivals (261 hp) but less torque (273 lb-ft); the current generation A6 is also, unfortunately, very old. Meanwhile, the slightly less dated Genesis G80 looks to be a bargain on paper, beginning at $56,300—and you get 300 hp from the jump.

Fuel Economy

The EPA rates the E350 at 24 mpg city and 33 on the highway for a combined 27 mpg, and I found that assessment accurate. My tester averaged 31 to 32 mpg on predominantly highway journeys, peppered with some suburban portions. With the big 17.4-gallon tank full of the minimum recommended 91 octane, you’ll be able to cruise up to about 480 miles at full capacity.

This compares fairly well to the E-Class’ competitive set of midsize luxury sedans with entry-level engines. The only rival that betters it on paper is the 530i xDrive, with its 27 city, 35 highway rating.

Value and Verdict

The 2024 Mercedes-Benz E350 absolutely hits its marks as a cozy, long-distance cruiser. And while there’s an ever-dwindling selection of sedans to potentially choose against it—most of which start much cheaper—the E-Class’ appeal lies in its effortless ride. On the whole, it’s not a package that screams value, especially when it’s a fully-loaded example sniffing at the mid-$80K range, like ours here. But if it’s no-compromise comfort you want, an entry-level build with the Airmatic add-on gets you there. And you can’t put a price on a calm stomach.

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