Mercedes-Benz E250 CDI: One flaw short of fantastic

In case of a pedestrian accident, the Active Bonnet spring system pops the hood up a couple of inches to make a softer place for said pedestrian to bounce off. Strangely, this makes the new E-class the car I'd most like to get run down by. The optional night vision system has a thermal imaging sensor that alerts the driver to the presence of pedestrians (not sure about vampires, who tend to run a lot cooler).

The intelligent lighting system dynamically shapes the beams of the bi-xenon headlights according to oncoming traffic, speed and terrain. Cornering and fog lights are integrated. It has five lighting modes so that, if the system sees that you're on a lonely country road -- prime territory for a single-car accident -- it will flood the landscape with beams worthy of a Baja 1000 truck. Very cool, like a Pink Floyd concert with headlights.

Many of these systems -- the Blind Spot Assist, Distronic distance-keeping cruise control, the Brake Assist Plus (which will pre-load the brakes for max stopping power in case of an impending rear-end accident and will actually slam on the brakes if the driver is completely out to lunch) -- are transferred from the S-class. One I like a lot is the Speed Limit Assist, which actually can read speed limit signs and post the number in the instrument cluster. I absolutely love ignoring this feature.

The whole car is like that. Everything is "adaptive" or "assisted" or "active" or "automatic." (I'm guessing the Mercedes German-English Wortbuch was lopped off after the "a" section.) That all of these systems and so much techie content have jumped over the cost-cutters' knives to land in the mid-price E-class tells me one thing: The stakes are high. It's no secret that Mercedes cost-cut itself out of the esteem of many longtime owners in recent years. No secret either that Audi and BMW have boxed out Mercedes in styling and performance, respectively. (Lexus outsells both brands in the U.S., but a Lexus just doesn't feel like a German car).

The E-class tells me somebody at the board level said, "Fix it." And here is why, when people ask me what kind of car to buy, I always say, if you can afford it, Mercedes-Benz. Year to year, model to model, some brands overtake and others fall behind. Mercedes certainly has had its little felt hat handed to it from time to time, and some of its cars have been laughable. But longitudinally, decade by decade, no other company has the technological chops, the brand poetry, the routine genius of Mercedes-Benz.