Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe Review 2024

The Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe is a car you buy with your heart rather than your head. If your head were choosing a big luxury SUV, it’d choose one with seven seats, a big boxy cabin, a comfortable, quiet ride, decent fuel economy, and all at a relatively affordable price. Basically, your head would choose an Audi Q7.

But not everyone wants sensible. Some want fun. Some want eye-catching. Some merely want to be different to everybody else, and they’re prepared to pay a premium to get it. If you’re one of those people, then the Mercedes GLC Coupe could well fit the bill. Compared with its rivals, it offers bags of luxury kit, powerful engines and a clever infotainment system that tech-heads will love.

With only powerful high-end engines to choose from, and one lavishly stocked trim on offer, you don’t have many choices to make with the Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe. It really just comes down to whether you want a petrol car or a diesel car.

Both have their positives. The petrol is faster and has a more sophisticated air suspension, while the diesel is cheaper to buy and run, but still stupidly fast. With a gun to our heads, we’d probably just give the nod to the diesel, not just for its economic advantage, but also for the fact you’ll have to stop less often to fill it up with fuel. But that really is all there is to it.

There was a time when a coupe was a coupe and an SUV was an SUV, and never the twain would meet. Those days, however, are over and it seems the slinkily-styled 4x4 is here to stay. 

The BMW X6 is probably the most obvious and best-known rival, and the Audi Q8 will also be looking to tempt the same buyers. Land Rover have a couple of contenders at this kind of size and price, with both the Range Rover Velar and the Range Rover Sport fitting the bill for customers. Porsche will also have a say with the excellent Cayenne Coupe.

Any luxury SUV needs to deliver a classy environment for its occupants, and the Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe does just that. The seats are leather (naturally) and the dashboard has a plush-feeling cover made from a (very convincing) man-made leather substitute. 

Dark wood trims inject a sense of modern sophistication, while those infotainment screens mean there’s a high-tech feel too. In terms of poshness, then, the GLE’s cabin feels right up there with its rivals.

However swish, though, the interior doesn’t feel quite as solid as rivals from Audi and BMW: pokes and prods of various bits and pieces result in a few more creaks and flexes than they do in other German cars, so the Merc doesn’t feel quite as dense or substantial. That said, it really isn’t far behind, and you certainly won’t feel like you’re slumming it.

The Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe uses Merc’s latest MBUX infotainment system, which centres around two glass-fronted 12.3-inch screens that are mounted side-by-side in front of the driver. These take most of the car’s numerous functions, plus all the information that would usually be delivered on traditional instrument dials, and present them all in one integrated unit. 

You can control the system in a number of ways. Voice control is the easiest, and the GLE’s sophisticated system is designed to recognise natural speech rather than specific commands. For instance, you can just tell the car that you're too hot, and it’ll knock the climate control down by a few degrees.

Otherwise, you tap and swipe on the left-hand screen, or via a touchpad and shortcut buttons placed on the central partition between the front seats. The graphics are sharp and the menus are logical, so it’s fairly easy to find your way around the system. However,  the touchpad controller is less precise, and thus more distracting, than the iDrive rotary dial you get in a BMW X6.

In the regular Mercedes GLE, the amount of functionality your infotainment system gets depends on which of the various trim levels you go for, but because the Coupe is only available in one high-spec version, everything is bundled in. 

That means you’ll get DAB radio, Bluetooth, a whole bunch of connected services, a wireless phone charging plate, Apple Carplay and Android Auto, a Burmester surround sound system and augmented reality navigation. This overlays instruction graphics over a camera image of the road ahead of you, pointing out precisely where you need to go. It looks really cool, and it’s also very handy. 

Like in most cars, there’s absolutely shed loads of headroom or legroom in the front seats, so nobody’s going to struggle for space. Storage is also pretty good, with a decent glovebox, big door pockets and a variety of lidded storage areas to keep odds and ends out of sight.

Legroom is pretty good in the back, too. There’s less than in the regular Mercedes GLE, admittedly, because the Coupe has a slightly shorter wheelbase, but there’s still loads of the stuff to play with. However, headroom isn’t quite so generous. That sloping roof line means that anyone much over six foot will find their head brushing the ceiling, so tall passengers will find themselves scooching down in their seat to fit.

While a seven-seat option has been introduced in the Mercedes GLE, the GLE Coupe version is still exclusively a five-seater. Probably just as well when the roof line drops so rapidly. That does mean that the boot is a little shallower than in a conventional SUV, but it’s still really good on size. It’s bigger, in fact, than you get in the Audi Q8, BMW X6 and Porsche Cayenne Coupe, and easily enough to cope with a bulky buggy and a selection of bags. The flush load lip also means that the space is easy to get to.

The GLE 350 d gets the smallest boot space of the GLE Coupe range at 510-litres and 1645-litres with the seats down. All other models get 655-litres with the seats up and a maximum of 1790-litres of space. 

The rear bench has a 40/20/40 split configuration, and when you fold them down, they lie perfectly flat, giving you a level load area. Obviously, the space you get in this configuration isn’t as big as in the regular GLE, but it’s still considerable.

In terms of exterior dimensions, the GLE Coupe has a big footprint to facilitate ample boot and passenger space at 5026mm long, 2157mm wide (including mirrors) and 1716mm tall. 

While the Mercedes GLE has a wide range of petrol and diesel engines to choose from (not to mention an interesting diesel plug-in hybrid) the Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe is offered - to begin with, at least - with only two engines. These are the highest-powered petrol and diesel engines found in the regular SUV, those being the 400 d and AMG 53, respectively.

The 400 d uses a 3.0-litre six-cylinder diesel unit with 330PS, but it’s the generous 700NM of torque that makes the bigger difference, while the fact that it’s available from just 1200rpm makes a bigger difference still. Put any meaningful pressure on the accelerator, and it takes off like a scalded animal, belting towards the horizon at a seriously rapid rate. It picks up speed pretty viciously on the move, too, so this is one very brisk car all round.

The standard nine-speed gearbox isn’t quite so responsive - bury the throttle for a sudden burst of acceleration and there’s a brief pause before the engine’s full fury is unleashed - but other than that, changes are fast and slick.

The AMG 53, meanwhile, uses a 3.0-litre six-cylinder petrol engine, which is sometimes given a wee bit of electric assistance (from what is essentially a posh starter motor) for a bit of extra shove. This makes it a mild hybrid. It delivers a very impressive 435PS, and on paper, it’s even quicker than the diesel, and by a considerable margin of almost half a second. However, as we haven’t tried it yet, we can’t tell you what it feels like.

The Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe does an impressive job here. The engine we’ve tried, the 400d, is particularly good. Because it punches so hard right from the bottom of the rev range, you’ll find that it barely needs to be ticking over to give you all the performance you’ll need for most driving situations. 

That keeps life very relaxed, and there's very little in the way of noise and vibration most of the time. Even when you do pile the revs on to see what the engine can do, it manages to stay wonderfully smooth, and it sounds satisfying rather than strained, too. Ease off to a gentle motorway cruise, and the engine settles into the background, and wind-and road noise are really well isolated too. Chuck in the smooth, barely perceptible gear changes from the automatic gearbox, and you have one very refined car.

With the regular Mercedes GLE, the precise amount of safety equipment you get depends on which trim your car is. However, because the Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe only comes in one high-end trim level that’s equivalent to the regular car’s range-topper, all the safety gear is thrown in as standard. It includes seven airbags, clever multi-beam LED headlights, an active pop-up bonnet to better protect pedestrians and a self-parking system with a 360-degree camera.

You also get automatic emergency braking, blind spot monitoring, lane keeping assistance, traffic sign recognition with automatic amendment of your speed, and super-clever adaptive cruise control that brings in a whole bunch of other clever functionality, allowing the car to pretty much drive itself under certain circumstances.

The Mercedes GLE Coupe hasn’t been crash tested by Euro NCAP, but the regular GLE SUV has, and achieved the full five-star rating. We can’t see any reason why the Coupe should perform any differently.

Mercedes-Benz generally performs well for reliability, ranking 13th out of 30 manufacturers in the latest HonestJohn.co.uk Satisfaction Index with an overall satisfaction score of 87.9%. Mercedes SUVs tend to be quite reliable with the standard GLE model scoring an average of 9.2 out of 10 for reliability. 

As to be expected the GLE Coupe matches the insurance groupings of the regular SUV that falls into groups 49 and 50 for the most powerful versions, making premiums very expensive. Because the Coupe only uses the most powerful engines, it sits in group 49 and 50 so insurance won’t be cheap.

The last big change in the VED rules brought about a flat rate of tax for petrol and diesel cars, but also created a £325 surcharge on cars that cost over £40,000 when new. That applies to all versions of the Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe, so between years two and six of the car's life, owners will be required to pay tax at a rate of £475 per year. 

After that, your annual tax will drop to the £150 flat rate. However, used car buyers can feel smug that they’ve dodged the hefty first-year tax payments that buyers of new examples are required to pay, which amounts to £1305 on the 400 d and £1850 on the AMG 53.

If you’re a company car driver, then Benefit-in-kind tax payments are based on 37% of the car’s value, meaning very steep bills.

While the regular GLE gives you a range of trim grades to choose from to suit your budget, the Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe comes in one all-singing-all-dancing trim that’s equivalent to its stable mate’s top-of-the-range version, meaning everything’s included in the (admittedly rather high) price.

On top of all the infotainment and safety gear already discussed, your roster of standard luxury kit includes four-zone climate control, heated and cooled front seats, power-folding door mirrors, automatic lights and wipers, four powered windows, keyless go, a panoramic roof and ambient lighting with no fewer than 64 colours. The only optional extras on new cars were metallic paint, a towing package and a servicing package, so used examples will all be of a very similar spec.