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Michael Taylor25 Mar 2015
REVIEW

Mercedes-Benz C 350 e 2015 Review

It's the second plug-in hybrid Mercedes and the cheapest, but can it deliver on its fuel-sipping promises?

Mercedes-Benz C 350 e sedan
International Launch Review
San Francisco, USA

You get the odd feeling that the parts of the C 350 e have been designed for engineers, by engineers. Things like a bewildering and frankly unnecessary array of driving modes hint at the deliverance of ability for its own sake, rather than the driver’s. Yet it’s superbly economical, silent, premium and cutting-edge around town, although the four-cylinder engine spoils the electric party when it kicks in.

So here come the hybrids. Mercedes-Benz now has two plug-in hybrid models on its books (the other is wrapped up in an S-Class bodyshell) with the C 350e sedan.

Mercedes-Benz has high hopes for its C 350 e, especially given that it will have another eight plug-in hybrids on sale by 2017 and that it steals a march on both Audi and BMW. In this end of the premium market, plug-in hybrid tech will have to wait for the next generation of the A4 (which will hit Europe by the end of this year), though BMW’s version will arrive with the facelifted 3 Series a couple of months sooner.

Due in Australia late this year along with the S 500 plug-in limousine, the C 350 e delivers 600Nm of total system power, a sub-six-second sprint to 100km/h and uses just 2.1L/100km on the NEDC combined cycle.

The rear-drive C 350 e works its magic by virtue of a 2.0-litre turbocharged petrol four-cylinder engine up front and a disc-shaped electric motor sitting inside the seven-speed transmission’s bell housing. There is a hefty high-voltage lithium-ion battery sitting in its own plate-steel box beneath the boot floor and two fuel flaps; one for petrol and the other, at the rear, for the charging cable.

A full charge should take about two hours on household mains power (the battery is a relatively small 6.38kWh version), while the fuel tank itself holds 50 litres. That’s range anxiety taken care of, then.

Benz pulls it all together with what it calls Intelligent Energy Management and then spins that off into a dazzling array of driving modes. You can drive it in Economy mode or, if that doesn’t suit you, switch to Comfort, Sport, Sport+ or the custom Individual mode, and that’s just the usual car stuff. Then there’s the hybrid system, which has four modes (Hybrid, E-mode, E-save and Charge) of its own.

It’s all a bit confusing and, in a car like this, probably unnecessary. The Hybrid mode has everything available to use, all the time, but you’re letting the car figure out what’s best for every situation. Then there’s the E-mode, which runs the car on the battery alone and is best used for inner-city trips. But E-mode isn’t alone, because there’s also an Eco Assist, which will use the radar cruise control’s data to pick up slower cars, then it sends a double pulse through the accelerator pedal to tell the driver to back off.

That leads directly to E-save, which will order the computer to maintain the battery’s energy levels, presumably because there’s a city trip coming up. And then there’s the Charge mode, which works the petrol engine harder to make the battery swell with juice – but also lifts the fuel consumption while it’s doing it.

If that’s not comprehensive enough, you can also plug in your satnav data and the computer will figure out where to dole out what kind of energy, and how much of it t you should spend.

And that’s how you get down to 2.1L/100km.

But, with a tide of premium plug-ins due to follow it, the manners it displays in getting down to that figure will be more important than the figure itself.

And is the C 350 e any good at that? Well, yes and no.

Leave it to its own devices in its default car settings (so, Hybrid and Comfort) and it’s a nippy, silent, sophisticated machine around town.

With 340Nm of torque from the electric motor alone (and all of that available instantly), the C 350 e can punch away from the lights with the best of them and you won’t get left behind up to around 50km/h, even if you don’t have the petrol motor running.

The electric motor might only have 60kW of power (power’s not really their thing — torque is), but it’s far stronger than it sounds on paper.

The beauty of it is Benz’s Haptic accelerator pedal, which doesn’t just do down-for-go and up-for-slow, but provides feedback via kickbacks and pulses and vibrations and it lets you know, very plainly, when you’re overstretching the abilities of the electric motor.

You have to push hard through a détente to get the petrol motor to kick in. What we found, in the reality of stop-start city traffic, is that you won’t make it kick in often and you won’t need it, either.

It’s more than strong enough with just the electric motor and it also fulfils the premium positioning very well, with no gear or electric motor whine and just quiet, fuss-free forward motion.

It also harvest energy every time the car brakes and most of the time, the braking will be done by the electric motor when it moonlights as a generator. Only when you really need to stop quickly will it bother the conventional friction-based braking system.

The issue of how premium the C 350 e is gets a little blurred with the arrival of the petrol motor, though.

It might be a sophisticated 1991cc device on paper, with 155kW of power at 5500rpm and 350Nm of torque from 1200rpm all the way up to 4000rpm, but it often doesn’t sound that way.

It can all too frequently get caught delivering more vibration, more whining and more coarseness than most Benz owners would expect when they shell out above-V6 money to get about-V6 performance. It’s too loud and doesn’t deliver the refinement you’d expect.

It doesn’t deliver the sort of punch you’d hope for when there’s a combined system power of 600Nm on offer, either, but 205kW of system power feels about right.

Benz insists the sedan will hit 100km/h in 5.9 seconds (the wagon version is 0.3 seconds slower) but you do feel the inertia of the extra motor and its extra fuel tank at every enthusiastically tackled corner.

Having 1780kg to lug around doesn’t seem to be a massive issue for the C 350 e when it’s moving in and around a city, but it becomes a bit clearer when it loses the mask of civility offered by the electric motor. That’s because the petrol engine’s efforts let you aurally measure exactly how hard it’s working when it’s driven with any vigour, and it works very hard indeed.

Mercedes-Benz insists the petrol engine gets all manner of assistance via boosting from the electric motor, but that does little to dull its vocals. Maybe it's gone for maximum fuel efficiency with it, but it shouldn’t have. It does help the speed and efficiency, especially when all that electric torque fills in the holes at low revs, but the petrol engine’s start-up kick-in could be smoother (like, for example, the kick-in on the Volkswagen Golf GTE or the Audi A3 e-tron.

The hybrid system adds 271kg to the weight of the standard C200 and 120kg of that is the battery pack. The electric motor itself is another 25kg and sits in a modified bell housing and is cooled by the same fluid that meanders around the transmission. Let’s circle back around to the first number though: 271kg is more than a quarter of a tonne.

It theoretically helps the handling that the weight distribution has been altered by the battery location and now 52 per cent of the mass sits atop the rear axle.

Maybe that’s what coerced Mercedes to fit it with the Sport trim level (though both AvantGarde and Exclusive exterior packs are available), and it includes Airmatic air suspension, even though that’s completely at odds with the frugal nature of its consumption figures. It does a great job of absorbing the energy of that extra weight and the handling always feels clean and efficient, rather than sparkling.

Its key is its ride quality, though. It’s supple and comfortable and quiet, and it never feels fussed about what manner of nastiness is confronting it beneath the tyres.

The upside of the Sport trim is that it’s well equipped, including leather seats, parking assistance, navigation and pre-entry climate control (yep, it’ll warm or cool the car for you before you get there). The last bit can be sorted on the web before you leave the office via Mercedes.me.

Aside from the unsophisticated nature of the petrol engine, the biggest issue with the C 350 e is its packaging. The battery pack jumps up about 50mm into the boot floor, lowering its capacity from 480 litres down to 335 litres, which is significant.

But there’s another problem. The boot is not trimmed very nicely at all. In the give and take of where money is spent on a car, you could understand Benz taking money out of boot trimming and giving the standard C-Class a cracking interior, especially for the front seat folks, with big efforts made on anything that’s touched and used frequently.

But a plug-in hybrid C-Class means people will go to the boot at least twice a day (to plug it in, then unplug it), maybe four times a day, if they also plug it in at work. And it doesn’t take long to notice that the boot struts aren’t even painted, that the plastic surrounds that hide the struts only go three quarters of the way around them and are clunky, that the inner boot lining finishes in a loose rough cut that is shamed by a Volkswagen Polo.

The biggest issue, though, is the charging cable. It sits in a bag in the left rear compartment of the boot. The compartment opening isn’t even attached to the side trim (it falls out when it’s opened) and you have to take the first aid kit out before you get to the charge-cable bag. And when you pull it out, it drags the carpet lining away with it every time, which will lead to a big gap sooner or later. It’s going to be annoying enough, after a while, to plug it in and unplug it every day, so why make it harder?

But overall, the C 350 e is a pretty good first effort at this level. Benz just needs to work on trimming the boot and refining the motor, then it’ll be fabulous.

2015 Mercedes-Benz C 350 e sedan pricing and specifications:
Price: TBC
On sale: Late 2015
Engine: 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol/electric
Output: 155kW/350Nm
Motor: Disc-shaped electric motor
Output: 60kW/340Nm
Total system output: 205kW/600Nm
Transmission: Seven-speed automatic
Fuel: 2.1L/100km (NEDC Combined)
CO2: 48g/km (NEDC Combined)
Safety rating: TBC

What we liked: Not so much:
>> Silent and strong in town >> Petrol engine lacks sophistication
>> No range anxiety >> Significant loss of boot space
>> Terrific interior quality >> Low-rent solution for charging-cable storage
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Written byMichael Taylor
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