OK, time for a further update and a few more observations regarding the differences between the pre-facelift PPP car and the facelift “standard” model.
When I bought my first W212, an E350CDI, I didn’t spec a reversing camera but having lived with one on my last E63 it fell into the “really useful things you never knew you needed” category. I was slightly wrong-footed when I test drove this facelift car as I’d expected it to have a reversing camera as standard, but it didn’t as it just preceded the spec change that moved it from option to standard kit. Although I had a copy of the OASIS report for the car, the absence of Option Code 281 just didn’t register. My bad as the Americans say. Anyway, it was easily rectified by
COMAND.co.uk who expertly retrofitted an OEM camera and, being as this is an NTG4.7-equipped car rather than the earlier NTG4.5 in my old car, I get the moving yellow guidance lines too
The other omission was an LSD. This is standard fitment on the S-model facelift E63’s, but is an option on the standard cars like mine, and mine wasn’t spec’d with it. Up until now, the only experience I’d had driving W212 E63’s had been cars fitted with the AMG Locking Differential (my pre-facelift PPP car had this as part of the Performance Pack Plus kit), and I was curious how much difference its absence would make. Now, this facelift car makes the same peak power as my old PPP car (557bhp), but “only” 720Nm of peak torque rather than the 800Nm of my old car. OK, so that’s 10% less, but without putting the two cars side by side I wouldn’t have expected to notice a significant difference in acceleration performance. However – and this was the surprise – this facelift car definitely didn’t seem to have the same initial urge as my old car when you buried the throttle from (say) 30 or 40mph. What I did anticipate was that the traction control would likely work a lot harder than on my old car in lower grip situations or when accelerating hard out of a corner, and initial experience with this car bore that out. Frankly, in those situations the traction control would cut in so hard that it completely killed the drive in a way that it never did on my old car
So it hadn’t taken me long to work out that I needed an LSD in this car and I made a call to
Birds Garage, the UK distributor of the Quaife ATB Differential for Mercedes-Benz cars…
With the usual poor timing that seems to characterise my life when it comes to time limited deals, while the
January 2016 Group Buy deal on Quaife diff’s was running I didn’t actually need one, but just after the deal finished I bought a new car that did
Anyway, I spoke with James Bird who kindly agreed to supply and fit a diff for me at the Group Buy price, which represented around 20% discount, so I quickly paid the required 30% deposit before he had a change of heart and then booked my car in for the work
I dropped my car at Bird’s after I finished work on Wednesday evening and drove home in a rental Toyota Aygo (
that was an experience!), returning Thursday evening to collect my E63. A pleasant surprise when I arrived was to find that they had also washed my car and hoovered it out which was a nice touch. After an exchange of pleasantries and payment of the balance due, the drive home – mainly on the M40 – was uneventful. Friday’s drive to and from work was, however, much more interesting.
Much of my daily commute is on some really rather pleasant fast B-roads which twist, turn, rise and fall: an ideal opportunity to see what a difference a Quaife makes
On Friday morning’s cold, damp, roads it was immediately obvious how much more traction there now is when exiting a corner. While the traction control will still cut in if severely provoked, it’s clearly not intervening in the way it had to with the open diff fitted and the car feels much more like my previous E63. The surprise however, was how much livelier and like my old car it now feels when planting your right foot from low speeds. Before it was
quick but not
fast, if you get my meaning, but now it takes off like my old car did: I can only conclude that with the open diff fitted the traction control was making low-level interventions more regularly than I would have expected and thus spoiling the fun. So, based upon my admittedly limited initial experience, I’d say that the Quaife ATB has been a worthwhile upgrade.
So what else? A few other differences twixt the old car and this have come to light over the last couple of weeks.
On startup from cold, the M157 Biturbo cars are initially quite loud. This is because the turbo’s are bypassed in order that the engine can be over-fuelled and the timing retarded so that the cat’s heat up quickly. After several seconds you can hear the exhaust note change and quieten as the bypass valves close, the turbo’s spool up and the idle drops from fast to a more normal speed. This fast idle / turbo bypass phase used to last ages on my old car, perhaps 40 seconds or more, but is much shorter on this facelift car which I’m sure my neighbours will be pleased about as I leave home at 7am on weekday mornings
On the subject of exhaust noise, now that the car is run in I’ve been using Sport+ and Manual modes on the gearbox, and the downshift blips are much more pronounced on this car. They’re both louder and – I think – longer in duration than they were on my old car. I love it
In my post above I mentioned that the gearbox seemed more willing to downshift when in Comfort mode than on my old car. I’ve also noticed that it naturally selects a lower gear than my old car would under certain identical driving conditions. An example of this is part of my commute route that goes up a hill that’s in three stages of increasing steepness, but levelling out a bit between each stage a bit like a funfair slide. If I set my old car on cruise at 60mph at the bottom of the hill it would stay in 7th all the way up. If I do the same in this one, it downshifts to 6th part way up the shallower gradient and then to 5th as the gradient increases. This is clearly a result of different gearbox software parameters, and has the effect that the car is more ready to accelerate (by being in a lower gear) than the old car was.
A slightly mysterious minor difference is that the oil temperature indicator on the AMG display switches from blue (don’t drive me too hard, because I’m cold) to white (I’m all warmed up and ready to go) at 71°C rather than at 80°C on my old car. I’m not sure why MB would have changed this, but they obviously have.
Finally, the Distronic Plus system is much smarter than it was on my 2012 car. The earlier version would sense a slower vehicle in front OK, but if you were in (say) lane one of a motorway travelling faster than a member of the Middle Lane Owner’s Club, the car would overtake on the inside. The new car’s system has the intelligence to recognise that at the current set speed you would overtake on the inside and slows down and maintains a following distance to the MLOC vehicle even if the lane ahead is clear. Clever. Also, if you come up behind a slower vehicle in front that causes Distronic to reduce speed, once you signal and start to move to the lane to the right the system starts to accelerate to facilitate the overtake. By contrast, the 2012 car would not have started to accelerate until you were completely in the lane to the right and it was clear ahead. Both these behaviour changes significantly improve the usefulness of the Distronic system and take something that was already good to the next level. The final bit of cleverness is the Stop & Go Pilot feature that does exactly what it suggests when you’re in stop and go traffic. It will brake to a halt and stop the car just like the old system did, but instead of requiring you as the driver to initiate forward motion again once the vehicle ahead moves, it now does this autonomously.
So there we are. It’s the same car but different.
All that remains to be done is a full detail at
Divine Detailing at the end of the month and it’ll be ready for the summer
