Techflash

Mercedes products is one of the trending cars in town this days.

The Silicon Valley carmaker’s two-fisted embrace of electrons and autonomy is an audacious, at times even ludicrous, attempt to steer the auto industry toward the future. But what if you want a car that can drive itself using an internal-combustion engine? Well, you probably should look at the 2017 Mercedes-Benz E-class, which still relies on fossil fuel to fill its tank.

On premium gasoline, the E300’s 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder makes 241 horsepower and 273 lb-ft of torque. That’s not a lot of power these days, but the nine-speed automatic transmission is somewhat able to compensate by keeping the engine in the meat of its powerband. Perhaps wisely, the exhaust sound of the four-cylinder turbo is always muted, even at full throttle. If there’s no sense in calling attention to the engine, there’s also no sense in letting it idle, so the auto stop/start system shuts it down when you come to a stop and does so as aggressively and smoothly as we’ve seen in any carmaker’s implementation of the technology.

We clocked the E300 4MATIC at 6.5 seconds from zero to 60 mph. By comparison, the C300 4MATIC does it in 6.1 seconds. The mid-size E-class tips the scales at 4060 pounds, 415 pounds more than the C-class; it’s no surprise that the smaller car outruns its sibling now that they share an engine. The last comparable all-wheel-drive E-class we tested, a 2014 model powered by a 3.5-liter V-6, managed zero to 60 mph in just 5.8 seconds. Sometimes the cutting edge cuts a little deeply.

This new version of the E-class is not so quick, but it is slightly larger, both in wheelbase (2.5 inches) and overall length (1.7 inches), which bumps the rear-seat space up to near the class leaders, but it’s still just shorter than the Audi A6. The new E-class also delivers a stellar automated driving experience. Mercedes’ latest iteration of semi-autonomous tech is as useful as that in any new vehicle. The Drive Pilot features come as part of a $10,400 options package that runs to 11 lines on the window sticker—on top of our test car’s $55,575 base price. We won’t list everything included in the Premium 3 package here; it makes more sense just to describe the operation of the system, which uses a stereo camera and front and rear radar to sense the world around it and guide the car.

As with Tesla’s Autosteer, you can set the cruise control in the E-class and let go of the steering wheel entirely, but only for up to 60 seconds before the car warns you to retake the wheel. Still, this far exceeds the 16 seconds of hands-free time offered by previous Mercedes models. That’s long enough to make it feel as if the