Is the 2025 Mercedes-Benz E450 All-Terrain a Good Luxury Station Wagon?
- The E450 All-Terrain is a joy to drive on pavement; it’s a roomy, comfortable and expensive vehicle, laden with overwrought technology that frustrates more than it impresses. Even so, it’s not just a good luxury station wagon, it might well be the epitome of the form.
How Does the 2025 Mercedes-Benz E450 All-Terrain Compare With Other Luxury Station Wagons?
- The Volvo V90 Cross Country and Audi A6 Allroad are the other luxurious and off-road-oriented station wagons on sale (for now), but the E450 All-Terrain is posher and more powerful. All three, however, including the Benz, may not be long for this world as automakers transition to SUVs and leave the wagon realm to performance vehicles.
Station wagons are a dying breed, but there are some encouraging signs of life from high-performance wagons, of all things. Mercedes-Benz announced its own return to the class with the coming AMG E53 Hybrid wagon, but even before that, the cupboard back in Stuttgart labeled “wagons for the U.S.” wasn’t bare: Meet the 2025 E450 All-Terrain, a luxury wagon cosplaying as an off-road vehicle.
Related: The Performance Wagon Is Back: 2026 Mercedes-AMG E53 Hybrid Wagon Revealed
The E450 All-Terrain wears plastic cladding on its fenders and below its rear bumper, with more cladding and a chrome strip on its rocker panels. It sports an adjustable air suspension with off-road settings, plus an off-road page in its touchscreen and the fanciest camera tech money can buy — including an “invisible hood” view.
Make no mistake, though: This is a luxury wagon meant to devour highway miles, with space for both cargo and you and your family (and maybe a friend, too).
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How Much Does the E450 All-Terrain Cost?
The short answer to this question is a pretty penny. The E450 All-Terrain starts at $77,250 (including destination charge). Our test vehicle totaled $87,960 with its variety of options, and it was missing an available Multicontour Seating Package, which includes massaging front seats. A nearly $90,000 Mercedes that won’t massage me? Please. (That statement is more than a bit bougie, I know, but I stand by it.)
The E450 All-Terrain is more expensive than direct competitors like the Volvo V90 Cross Country and Audi A6 Allroad, but it costs significantly less than trendy performance wagons like the Audi RS 6 Avant and BMW M5 Touring. Its price tag also puts this wagon in a bit of an odd place in Mercedes’ own lineup: The similarly sized and capable GLE SUV starts more than $10,000 less, and the larger three-row GLS SUV has a starting price just a bit higher than our decently equipped E450 All-Terrain.
How Does the E450 All-Terrain Drive?
Let’s get our off-road impressions out of the way: During our time with the wagon, we took our test vehicle to Holly Oaks ORV Park in Holly, Mich. … and left it in the parking lot. It did very well on (maintained) unpaved roads, but we were at the park for a comparison test of more serious off-road vehicles.
On the highway and around town, however, the E450 behaves beautifully. Its mild-hybrid, turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six-cylinder powertrain produces 375 horsepower, which dwarfs the V90 Cross Country’s 295-hp output and exceeds the A6 Allroad’s 335 hp — and that’s not counting the Mercedes’ boost mode, which unleashes an extra 23 hp and 151 pounds-feet of torque when called upon. Mercedes says the E450 can go from 0-60 mph in 4.6 seconds, and that certainly feels believable — perhaps even a little conservative. Power delivery is pleasantly linear, and the standard nine-speed automatic transmission usually finds the right gear without issue, though it can be hesitant when you put the accelerator to the floor.
With two adults and luggage, we observed fuel economy in line with the E450’s EPA rating of 22/31/25 mpg city/highway/combined. The wagon thrives on the highway, and the standard Airmatic air suspension makes for a comfortable and composed ride. As an added bonus, in its Comfort setting, the suspension automatically lowers the car by 0.6 inch at speeds above 75 mph for improved efficiency. The ride firms up in Sport mode, and with our test vehicle’s optional 20-inch wheels and tires, impacts over bumps and highway seams were a bit too harsh for my taste. My preferred driving setting was the Individual program, which allows drivers to pick and choose a variety of settings to their liking. I had the steering and powertrain set to Sport, for improved responsiveness and the weightier steering feel I prefer, but the suspension in Comfort, for a cushier ride.
Judged on driving experience alone, the E450 All-Terrain is worth every penny.
How Good Is the E450 All-Terrain’s Interior and Technology?
As with many current-generation Mercedes vehicles, this feels like a very mixed bag. On one hand, the E450 All-Terrain’s interior is spacious and comfortable (even without massaging front seats). Materials quality is mostly excellent, especially with the optional Leather Package — different from the also optional leather upholstery on our test vehicle — which adds leather to the upper dashboard. The cabin is quiet and outward visibility is solid.
On the other hand (literally), the touch-sensitive steering-wheel controls feel cheap and are clumsy to operate. I would like to have a chat with the individual who thought the small volume slider should also have an option for single-press input. It’s too easy to slide when you mean to press once or press once when you mean to slide. On top of that, the large 14.4-inch central touchscreen houses most of the climate controls, which I’d prefer to manage via actual physical controls. Below it is a single bar of touch-sensitive controls for drive modes, the camera system and audio controls. Some Mercedes models — including the GLE SUV — still have buttons, switches and knobs, and those models feel more luxurious than this.
The optional Superscreen adds a 12.3-inch touchscreen for the front passenger that is sometimes visible to the driver even while in motion, which I found distracting. It also offers a feature set (games, internet browser, video streaming) that feels, at best, redundant in an era of smart devices, but I’ll bet it still wows shoppers on the showroom floor.
An Off-Road page lives in the All-Terrain’s central touchscreen, and it’s full of the usual goodies, like gauges to measure the wagon’s attitude, hill descent controls, and a dedicated camera system that includes an invisible hood view for traversing obstacles without the aid of an outside spotter. These are nice software features, but the E450 lacks the hardware to fully take advantage of them.
The E450 All-Terrain also includes a built-in AI assistant that’s capable of chiming in without a direct prompt from a vehicle occupant, leading to many mid-conversation interruptions — followed by myself and my passenger responding with some version of “Shut up!” or “Go away!” with increasing levels of frustration. The one saving grace for this … feature … is that you have the option to turn it off, and the menu used to do so is fairly easy and intuitive to navigate.
While the cabin is plush, it’s overloaded with pricey gizmos and gadgetry that feel destined to frustrate — or go unused. Our E450’s nearly $88,000 price tag becomes harder to swallow when you consider how its features actually work.
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Should You Buy an E450 All-Terrain or an SUV?
It might sometimes seem that auto writers are legally obligated to rave about station wagons — given how many of my fellow auto writers do — but while I do like a good station wagon, the prospect of paying almost $88,000 for an all-terrain luxury wagon full of annoying technology really tests my limits. With the base GLE SUV carrying a significantly lower starting price (and also costing several thousand dollars less when equipped with the same powertrain as the E450 All-Terrain), plus Mercedes’ larger, three-row GLS’ base price being similar to the as-tested price of our E450, I have a hard time arguing for the All-Terrain on practical grounds.
But for wagon devotees who don’t want a high-performance model, the E450 All-Terrain drives so well I’m willing to overlook its technological and aesthetic issues. Maybe I do have a bit of a wagon bias after all.
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