Some cars are built to be looked at, some to be driven, and a few to be lived in. The GLC 400 aims to do all three, and there is no better test than a late-summer week in south-west Germany.
My week began outside the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, where a line-up of classics was parked in the morning light: the S-Class sedans coded W116, W126 and W140, and a W123, the 1980s ancestor of today's E-Class. Car people talk in model codes. The rest of the world simply calls them beautiful.
Ask anyone who grew up in the 1980s to draw a Mercedes and it would look like the W123: large rectangular headlights, orange indicators and a confident three-box shape that made no concession to aerodynamics. It was also the first Mercedes I ever rode in, in Captain Amarinder Singh's car, when I was in Class 4 or 5. Back then, owning one put you in a small, rarefied circle in India.
I drove a 1981 240D, with about 72 horsepower and a four-speed manual. Nobody would call it thrilling, but it was supremely comfortable, and examples of this car have crossed two million kilometres as European taxis. It is the kind of calm, unhurried travel that a lifestyle writer should love.
But I was not in Stuttgart for the past. I was here to drive the future.
Mercedes-Benz India will launch the electric GLC on November 4, with deliveries from mid-November. It will be assembled at the Chakan plant near Pune, with several components sourced from Indian suppliers. That makes it the fastest global model to arrive in India as a locally assembled car, just six months after European sales began. Over 650 prospective buyers expressed interest in the first 36 hours. India will get the GLC 400 4MATIC, which pairs a 94 kWh battery with two motors for all-wheel drive.
It wears the same badge as the petrol and diesel GLC, but it is a different car. The grille carries 940 backlit squares that glow in changing patterns. The wheelbase is 84 mm longer, at 2,972 mm, and the car is 142 mm longer overall, with nearly all of it going to rear-seat passengers and luggage. The boot holds 570 litres. It is slightly wider as well, which matters more than you would think when you are sitting in the back.
Stuttgart is not what most visitors imagine. It sits in a bowl of hills, with vineyards climbing the slopes above the city and the Neckar river winding through. Within half an hour of leaving the city, the landscape opens into rolling farmland, orchards and small villages with half-timbered houses and church spires. In late summer the light is golden, the fields are turning, and the roads are almost empty on a weekday morning.
This is where an electric SUV makes its case. The GLC is almost silent, so the drive becomes a quiet one. You hear tyres on tarmac, the occasional church bell and, with the windows down, the countryside itself. With a claimed WLTP range of up to 715 km, a day trip out of Stuttgart would not worry the battery in the slightest.
The Autobahn was busier than I hoped, so I saw only 165 to 170 km/h on the unrestricted stretches. The GLC has far more in hand, with 360 kW (about 490 horsepower) and a claimed 0 to 100 km/h in 4.3 seconds. It was on the winding roads at the edge of the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest, that it impressed me more. The road climbs into dark pine forest, bends through valleys, passes farmhouses with deep, sweeping roofs and drops back into sunlit meadows. The GLC felt balanced, planted and calm, and it did not feel like a heavy SUV. At the end of the day, a stop at a roadside inn and a plate of local Swabian food felt like the right way to end it.
If the road is one half of the experience, the cabin is the other.
One seamless screen: The 39.1-inch MBUX Hyperscreen is the largest display Mercedes has fitted to a production car. It runs across the entire dashboard under a single sheet of glass, with no visible joins, and looks like part of the architecture rather than an add-on.
The skylight: The panoramic roof is lit from within, with illuminated stars that shimmer overhead and a design that changes the mood of the cabin. After a day among the pines and vineyards, sitting back and watching the evening sky through it is a rare luxury.
Ambient lighting: The lighting is the most evolved Mercedes has made, with soft colours that wash through the cabin and change the atmosphere to suit the time of day and your mood. It feels more like a hotel lounge than a car.
All of this runs on the new MB.OS operating system, developed largely by thousands of engineers in Bengaluru. I wrote years ago that every Mercedes-Benz carries a piece of India inside, and I was pleased to hear my words used by Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius at the SIAM conference a couple of weeks ago.
I don't hanker for the past. Today's cars, electric ones especially, are safer, cleaner and more capable than ever. But something is missing, and 'feel' is the best word I have for it. An electric car has no real throttle. Pressing the accelerator is like turning the dial of a ceiling fan, and the lack of vibration and sound still feels strange. Not wrong, only strange. I am more used to it now, and with the instability in the Middle East I am more convinced than ever that we need electric vehicles. But I am glad Mercedes-Benz Classics keeps cars like the 240D running. The GLC 400 will be the better car for most of us. The W123 reminds us that cars once had a soul, and the best new ones are finding it again.