2027 Mercedes-Benz GLE 450 and GLE 580 First Test: Aging Like White Wine

Pros

• Powerful yet silky engines
• Buttery ride on smooth pavement
• Vault-quiet inside

Cons

• Ride gets real bad, real fast
• Tech is less impressive than cheaper models
• Old car feels old

If you know anything about aging wine, you know it’s not as simple as putting it in the basement and forgetting about it for a decade. Nearly all wines have a shelf life; it’s just a matter of how many years or decades before they peak and start falling off. White wines can age, but almost none can last anywhere near as long as a red. It’s the same for cars. Some age like fine red wines, some age like milk, and others, like the 2027 Mercedes-Benz GLE-Class, age like white wine.

You’re Not Supposed to Be Here

This fourth-generation GLE (née ML) went on sale in 2019 as a 2020 model and received a planned midcycle refresh in 2023 for the 2024 model year. Now it’s been refreshed for the 2027 model year, though Mercedes-Benz would like you to know it’s way more than just a refresh. “New car in old clothing” is how they put it to us, but we think it’s more like a facelift, a triple bypass, and a double knee replacement.

Why an unusual second refresh at all, especially on a luxury car that’s going on eight years old? An insider at Mercedes-Benz gave it to us straight: This wasn’t the plan. The GLE and EQE SUV were supposed to merge into a single new electric SUV around this time, but the EV transition hasn’t happened nearly as quickly as Mercedes-Benz product planners thought it would. Both vehicles have since been granted a stay of forced merger, and the GLE has received an emergency second refresh to keep it as updated as is realistically possible.

New Heart, New Knees, New Nose

The old guy has definitely had work done. We got our hands and test equipment on the midgrade GLE 450 and GLE 580 models, the former with a beautifully updated turbocharged and supercharged inline-six and the latter with a fantastic new twin-turbo, flat-plane-crank V-8. Both also came equipped with a freshly retuned air suspension, optional on the 450 and standard on the 580.

There’s been cosmetic work, as well. Up front, designers have shoehorned the outgoing corporate racoon face onto the front end, and it ends up looking squished. Surrounding the grille with black plastic hasn’t worked well on most of the Mercedes-Benz lineup, and it isn’t great here, either. As ever, there are as many stars shotgunned onto the grille as possible, plus a few in the headlights and taillights for good measure.

Inside, the lesser of the new dash-spanning Superscreens has been jimmied in and forced to play nicely with the outdated touchpad on the center console. The two were clearly never intended to meet, and it’s best to ignore the pad. The “screen” itself is in fact three screens behind a common pane of glass; while technically impressive, it comes off more like a sales display at Best Buy. The less expensive GLC offers a superior Superscreen that’s actually one continuous screen end to end, which is far more impressive. Even still, a wall of screen doesn’t read as traditional luxury, and all the design seems to have gone into the somewhat overwrought vents since they were the only thing left on the dashboard for designers to work on.

Just Like the Old Days

Test gear all hooked up, we ran the numbers on both cars, and unsurprisingly, they’re both a little better than before.

The inline-six in the 450 used to just be turbocharged and mildly hybridized, but now that there’s a supercharger, too, it makes an extra 44 lb-ft of torque. That’s nice but not a ton on a 5,385-pound vehicle, so no surprise it runs the same 4.9-second sprint to 60 mph and 13.5-second quarter mile as the 2025 GLE 450 Coupe we tested. Far more impressive is how silky-smooth it is even when it’s working hard. There’s so little vibration, you can barely tell it’s running, and in-gear torque is so stout, there’s little reason to buy the V-8 beyond the prestige.

Pony up for that prestige, though, and you’ll get places quicker. The 580’s new V-8 makes an extra 20 hp and 15 lb-ft (still twin-turbo and mildly hybridized), which also isn’t much, but it’s enough to knock a tenth of a second off the 60-mph and quarter-mile times, taking them down to 3.8 seconds and 12.3 seconds, respectively. Not bad on an SUV that weighs 5,591 pounds and isn’t an AMG model. More impressive is that it’s just as smooth as the I-6, especially since it’s a flat-plane-crank engine with balance shafts to tame it. The only extra thing we’d like from it is a more aggressive exhaust note, as it’s very quiet.

Mercedes-Benz engineers also have both models stopping well. The 450 is up slightly in the 60–0 braking test, which it now completes in 108 feet, but the old Coupe we’re comparing it to was 300 pounds lighter. The 580 is also heavier than the last one we tested, but it cut its stopping distance down a whopping 7 feet to 103 feet.

When it comes to handling, the new and old models are largely similar despite the updated suspension hardware on the new ones. The 450 pulls the same 0.90 average lateral g on the skidpad and knocks a tenth off the figure-eight time at 25.8 seconds at 0.74 cumulative average g. The 580 bumps its skidpad number two-hundredths to 0.91 average lateral g and knocks its figure-eight time down an impressive 0.7 second to 25.0 seconds at 0.80 cumulative average g.

All that said, the experience behind the wheel is good but nothing special. As they’re not AMG models, the somewhat excessive body roll is forgivable. Both turn into a corner about as eagerly as you’d expect a big SUV to corner, and they hold on as well as you’d hope a non-sport model might. Exactly what you need for the average commute and not much more.

Lost a Step or Three

Our real gripe is with the ride quality. In our First Drive, we noted it rides like a ’78 Lincoln on perfectly maintained European roads. A bit of uneven pavement, though, especially in a corner, will have it floating around like a waterbed on wheels. There’s a disconcerting lateral movement in the rear suspension that’s enough to make some passengers carsick by itself.

It doesn’t get any better from there. Bigger bumps crash through the air suspension and send shudders all the way up to the ceiling. You hear and feel every bump in the road. What’s worse is when the bumps are offset, which results in an unacceptable amount of head toss as you’re thrown about in your seat.

Since it has an off-road mode and height-adjustable air suspension, we took it for some light off-roading, and it was such a miserable experience, we won’t ever do it again. Traction was fantastic, to be clear, even in deep sand. It was the feeling of being beaten up in our seat that put us off the whole experience.

What’s really disappointing is, no one on staff who’s driven both the old and new models can remember the old ones doing any of that before, on-road or off.

Fading Youth

You’ll forgive us, then, if we’re not buying Benz’s “new car, old clothes” line. This is clearly an older model that’s had a lot of last-minute work done to keep it fresh, but none of it is convincing enough to make us believe this was ever the plan. We’re not saying Mercedes-Benz can’t pull off a well-executed second refresh on an older model, because we’ve driven the new S-Class, and it’s fantastic. The S-Class, though, is the brand’s north-three-pointed-star, and it gets special treatment.

The new GLE is a perfectly fine vehicle for your suburban commute (provided your wealthy suburb takes good care of its roads), but it’s not as successful at passing itself off as anything more than “new parts, old car.” Hopefully, we’ll feel different when we get our hands on the other models, particularly the AMG models.