Long-Term Road Test Wrap-Up
From the August 2014 Issue of Car and Driver
Like its spirit animal, the massive, majestic American buffalo, the American-made Mercedes-Benz GL450 is ideally suited to the wide-open spaces of our vast continent, where it can roam widely, consuming a vast amount of natural resources.
Like the buffalo, the GL once ran with huge herds—in this case, of full-size SUVs across North America. Times have changed for these mechanical bovines from when nearly a million Americans bought them every year. In 2013, the class managed only about 350,000 sales. But the GL is a survivor. This second-generation GL, which arrived for the 2013 model year, has been outselling the Cadillac Escalade and Lincoln Navigator combined.
To check the health of the dominant member of the luxury-SUV class, and because we have children and junk to carry (and junky cars to tow), we ordered up a 2013 GL450 and immediately headed out on the buffalo traces that we call interstates. And, for the sake of extending our buffalo metaphor beyond all reason, we specified the company’s Dakota Brown Metallic paint.
We chose the 450 version, with its 362-hp, twin-turbo 4.6-liter V-8, because it sits at the fat end of GL sales. The optional diesel would have been more efficient. The upsized V-8 of the GL550 would have proven unnecessarily quicker and also thirstier and more expensive. And the 550-hp GL63 AMG is just crazy.
Starting at $64,805, the GL450 seemed not gallingly expensive by full-size luxury-SUV standards. Somehow, though, we managed to pile $26,040 in options onto our three-row family truckster, bringing the total bill to a staggering $90,845. But hey, you didn’t expect us to go without chrome door-handle inserts and hood-fin covers, did you? By the way, those shiny bits cost $225.
Other arguably unnecessary or frivolous items included illuminated running boards, a chromed exhaust, and 20-inch wheels for $1340; heated rear seats for $620; a heated steering wheel for $225; panoramic sunroof for $1090; black leather seating surfaces for $1620; heated/ventilated front seats for $570; power-folding second-row seats for $400; and that brown metallic paint for $720.
Functional options included Mercedes’ $2800 Driver Assistance package (active blind-spot assist, active lane-keeping assist, and radar-based cruise control); its $1290 Parking Assist system with cameras that provide a 360-degree view of the vehicle’s surroundings; the $2900 Active Curve system (active anti-roll bars to snub body roll); a $550 towing package; $1290 curve-illuminating headlights with adaptive high-beams; and an $1800 On/Off Road package (two locking differentials, six transmission settings, and adaptive dampers), which really only ever saw use on road.
Possibly, by now you’ve divined that our truck was loaded to the hood-gills. Oh, and because the GL would serve as our road-tripper of choice, we felt that the $1950 twin-screen, rear-seat entertainment package was critical to long-term mental health.
To say the GL450 hit the ground running is to massively understate the case. In the bronze bus’s first two months, we covered more than 10,000 miles visiting (on separate trips) Kentucky, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia, in addition to commuting to and from the office. And we were smitten. The logbook filled with kind words about the long-term comfort of the seats and a highway ride so soothing that it was almost narcotic. A few of us even began to feel comfortable with the radar-directed cruise-control system that, on long slogs, relieved operators of the tedious business of maintaining a set speed and a safe distance from the car ahead.
Carolyn Pavia-Rauchman: I love the fact that the back-up-camera system sees not just to the rear but also to the sides.
Jeff Sabatini: Seat fold-down functionality is great. Call me bourgeois, but after years of owning minivans with complicated folding mechanisms, I like simple, one-button/one-lever seats.
K.C. Colwell: One-hundred-dollar fill-ups with a 500-mile highway range is pitiful.
Don Sherman: The silly [column-mounted] shifter is growing on me. Hopefully there’s a salve for that.
Mike Fazioli: An amazingly unintuitive DVD entertainment system.
That was the curious thing about the GL: Nobody really enjoyed driving it as we would a car. The steering is superlight and artificial feeling. The body rocks fore and aft in day-to-day traffic. And the lazy throttle calibration can lead to graceless departures from a stop. But hey, you don’t expect a buffalo to be able to dance the waltz—at least not well. And, in its element, which is to say covering many miles quickly and quietly on interstates, the GL was a supremely evolved conveyance.
Powertrain performance was never a concern. The 5855-pound GL450 got to 60 mph in 5.9 seconds at the beginning of its stay with us, and dropped an insignificant tenth of a second to 5.8 seconds after 40,000 miles. The quarter-mile remained a steady 14.4 seconds from beginning to end. That’s as quick or quicker than is necessary, strictly speaking, for such a vehicle. Never once did any complaint about the seven-speed automatic make it to the logbook. It swapped gears smoothly and eagerly enough. Braking performance was good, too, considering the weight of the thing. It posted a 70-to-0-mph stop of 179 feet on its first test and improved by 10 feet on its final one.
What those braking numbers don’t tell you is that the GL’s mushy brake pedal meant that drivers sometimes misjudged the vehicle’s decelerative performance and found, halfway through a stop, that they needed to add more braking force in a hurry. Adding to the impression that the anchors might be a bit overmatched by the heft, we suffered three bouts of vibration under braking. At 11,592 miles our dealer replaced the rear rotors. At 15,154 miles, we returned to our dealer for fresh front rotors to quell the returning vibration. When the shakes came back again at around 30,000 miles, we hoofed it back to the dealer for another new pair of front rotors and pads. All of this was under warranty and cost us nothing. But it did mean we had to make a couple of unscheduled visits. The only time the braking system actually cost us money was on our second front-rotor replacement when the dealer deemed our rear pads to be excessively worn and not covered under warranty. New pads, wear sensors, and labor totaled $493.
We made another unscheduled dealer visit at 18,458 miles because the chrome trim on the driver’s door was peeling off. A new piece was fastened. But the same strip of trim separated and flew off on the expressway just before the 40,000-mile mark. We also managed to break the release handle on the second-row seat. All of the above was covered under warranty, as was the hood-release lever that we tore clean off the underside of the instrument panel at around 38,000 miles. The only faulty trim bit that we actually were on the hook to pay for was a wiper-arm cover that was liberated from the vehicle by an automatic car wash. That cost us $22.
Erik Johnson: This is all the engine you need in this beast. The GL550/GL63 are overkill.
Austin Lindberg: If my body didn’t need to expel liquids and the GL didn’t so frequently need to take on liquids, I could drive forever in comfort.
Eddie Alterman: More rattles than a Babies “R” Us.
John Phillips: The low-washer-fluid warning is something that would scare NASA.
Mike Sutton: Probably the best winter machine I’ve ever driven. It’s pretty much invincible in all the snow, ice, and muck of the Snowpocalypse.
The brake system’s weaknesses concerned us a bit. The rest of the issues were minor nuisances. We were perplexed, though, by the vehicle’s occasional electro-psychotic episodes. Apropos of nothing, the GL’s massively complicated electrical systems would just take a break. Sometimes the rear cameras would fail to function. Sometimes all of the electronic safety nets would throw their tiny silicon hands up and refuse to do anything but warn us that they were inoperative. Thankfully, cycling the ignition always set things straight. The dealer could never find a fault with the vehicle, possibly because the GL had gone back on its meds in the intervening time. But it was frustrating. On one occasion, we hopped in the GL on a particularly frigid morning to find its battery completely dead—that would be when we yanked the hood-release lever off the SUV. A jump from a kindly woman in a rusted-out Ford Windstar got us moving again.
The GL required five scheduled service stops for the 40,000 miles, totaling $1886. The 40,000-mile service alone (including an oil change; tire rotation; fuel, air, and cabin filters; and a brake-fluid flush) cost us a hefty $678. Combine that with the GL’s 16-mpg average over its stay, and the cost of running this bus was substantial.
Top left: Sitting in the commodious "way back" is no punishment. Bottom: When the drive is 10-plus hours, the GL is where you want to be.
On the upside, the GL450 was, for many of us dwellers of the upper Midwest, the ultimate snow machine during what proved to be the ultimate snow season. The thing was simply unstoppable. We used Pirelli Scorpion Ice & Snow tires during the winter, which helped a great deal in that regard.
Despite its outsized appetite for brake rotors and occasional spells of pure crazy, we remain stubborn fans of the GL450’s accommodating interior, smooth powertrain, and easygoing demeanor. And, you know, buffalo aren’t exactly perfect, either. —Daniel Pund
