Mercedes-Benz E-Class Cabriolet review

It's a four-seater, so fully grown adults can travel in the back with minimum fuss. The seats are quite upright, so we wouldn’t want to spend hours back there – but knee and shoulder room is more than adequate. A six-footer could sit behind themselves with little drama. If that were actually possible. Rear passengers even get a USB-C port each, as well as individual climate control toggles and a cupholder. Plenty of actual family cars aren’t as generous to those perched in the back.

Up front sits an impressively laid out dashboard that, with the E’s mid-life facelift, has gained much tech. Two large screens (of varying sizes depending on your options spend) offer up media and nav functions and the dials, the latter cycling through a dizzying amount of different layouts, though thankully a classic speedometer and rev counter sit side-by-side and equally sized in at least one of them.

It all works well, operating via touchscreen, buttons or a scroll wheel – as well as voice control if you speak close enough to RP – which makes the slightly less cohesive steering wheel a bit of a disappointment.

It’s chockful of functionality, and you can operate both screens almost entirely with deliberate little swipes of your thumbs, but it’s never quite as quick or instinctive to use as you’d hope and can often require a flick of your eyes from the road ahead to make sure your thumb is actually in the right place. It's a standard bugbear of screen-like surfaces elbowing out good ol’ buttons, and it’s far from a disaster. But it could be enough to break the interior serenity in your early days with the car.

Other points of note? One single button can pop all four side windows up or down in one go, which is oddly satisfying and brings the classic ‘pillarless Mercedes coupe’ feel to a drop-top car. Perfect for airing everyone out if you don’t want the full exposure of roof-down travel. There are three USB-C ports up front, a huge central cubbyhole big enough to impinge on elbow room and the boot offers 360 litres of storage capacity – down around 15 per cent on the E-Class Coupe’s 425 litres.

Oh, and new to the E-Class Coupe and Cabrio is ‘energising comfort control’, which uses ambient lighting, music and massage functions (if fitted) to keep you alert and, well, energised during a long drive. If you have a Garmin watch it’ll even pick up your stress level and sleeping patterns and feed them into the mighty algorithm that decides how to soothe your aura. Crikey.