Well the hire of the Mercedes GLB has been ‘eventful’. On Monday I just drove it to the post office and back, so too short a journey to get a feel for it. On Tuesday we decided to go out for lunch and pop to Waitrose afterwards to use some 20% off vouchers. Started the car and the digital dashboard was completely black. The entertainment system was on but the instrument binnacle was dead. Nothing. I switched the ignition off and back on a couple of times. Still nothing. I got out the car and locked it, left it a minute or so and unlocked it again. Still nothing. Started to drive (still with no instrument cluster) and noticed that the car was in what I call ‘limp home mode’. Next to no power and max speed of round 15mph. No error messages as no dashboard! After a while I engaged kick down and this seemed to clear the engine management system. As the car was now drivable (albeit with me having to guess what speed I was doing) we went to the pub for lunch. After lunch the car started OK and the digital dash sprang back into life. Bizarre. We did the Waitrose shop and again everything was fine so I was a bit reluctant to ask Eurpocar to swap it unless it did it again
However, it was Sod’s law, as I had a really important meeting to go to first thing Wednesday and was worried that it might do it again the next morning, so I parked the £45k 21 reg Merc at my daughters and borrowed her 2015 Ford Focus so that I knew that I would get to the meeting without worrying! Not a good advert for Mercedes! After the meeting I swapped the cars back over and thankfully it hasn’t gone into limp home mode again and the dashboard is working.
Obviously the Mercedes GLB isn’t on Motability, but if it was I definitely wouldn’t want one. Not just because of the problems I have had, but because the MBUX infotainment system is hopeless compared to BMW’s iDrive. Unlike the BMW system, it’s just not intuitive at all, the voice control is hopeless and it is very easy to accidentally do things that you don’t intend to. I did a 150 mile round trip today and it’s driven me nuts. I have inadvertently changed the radio station about 4 times, the sat Nav took me to the wrong place even though the postcode was correct (in the end I had to stop and use Google Maps on my iPhone). The extra time this took made me late. The quality of sat Nav mapping is poor. I cannot see how to change the map scale. You must be able to but for the life of me I cannot work it out. The current road speed limit doesn’t show all the time and when it does it often flashes which is damned irritating. Beyond Sat Nav, selecting and changing menus is a right faff. It’s either laggy or jumps ahead. No rotary dial to control it easily. I could go on.
I have to say that I will be very glad to get the X1 back. The GLB feels a lot bigger inside but other than the added space I would say that the BMW betters it in every single respect. The X1 might feel a little older, but everything works accurately and easily and all functions are intuitive. The only thing that still irritates me about the X1 is the fact that it doesn’t have auto hold, but the GLB doesn’t have it either which really surprised me.
Seeing as most people on this forum are obsessed with MPG, I should report that the GLB diesel is economical. The 220d engine (which is quite noisy and obviously a diesel) delivered 51.4mpg at a steady 65-70mph on the motorway and some A road and town driving, which I thought was pretty good. Hoping that the X1 will be returned tomorrow as the novelty of having something new to try out has well and truly worn off now!