Mercedes-Benz C-Class Estate Review & Prices

The Mercedes C-Class Estate is a comfortable, spacious and stylish family wagon that’s very easy to live with day-to-day. It’s tech heavy, too, but the infotainment system is fiddly to use and it’s not as fun to drive as its alternatives.

It’s a bit like a beige cashmere jumper. Yes, it’s luxurious and comfy to wear, but it’s not as out-there as the sporty, designer hoodie BMW 3 Series Touring, or as sleek as the crisp, classy, white shirt Audi A5 Avant.

But much like the aforementioned cashmere jumper, the C-Class Estate exudes a sense of poshness from the second you lay your eyes on it. The 3 Series may look more dynamic and the A5 is sleeker, but the C-Class’s upright grille, smooth flanks and teardrop-shaped taillights are oh-so-classy and make the Mercedes look more expensive than it is.

The C-Class shares its swoopy dashboard design with far posher, higher-priced Mercedes models such as the GLC, SL and CLE. The portrait-oriented 11.9-inch infotainment display dominates the cabin, swooping up from the centre console and floating above the interior trim. The driver gets a 12.9-inch digital instrument cluster, too.

Annoyingly, the infotainment is a pain to navigate, requiring a lot of swiping (either on the screen itself or the unintuitive steering wheel trackpad) to get to the sub-menu you’re after. The touchscreen climate controls are also fiddly to use, but at least there’s a shortcut bar with some basic functions included.

The interior is largely high quality, with the upper surfaces all trimmed in plush-feeling vegan leather, though the lower door cards, lower dashboard and centre console all feel a bit brittle by comparison. You get a good amount of storage space, with long door bins and a pair of hidden cubbies between the seats.

There’s plenty of room to get comfy up front, and rear passengers are treated to plenty of headroom and legroom - especially with the panoramic roof. You get a nifty phone holder worked into the rear flip-down armrest, as well as a pair of pop-out cupholders.

The boot is 490 litres in most models - 10 litres down on the 3 Series - but the plug-in hybrid (PHEV) model loses a shocking 130 litres of room for the batteries.

Around town the C-Class Estate is a very cosseting car to drive, flattening speedbumps and filling potholes as you drive along. Very sharp dips in the road do thud through the cabin, but otherwise it's a very comfortable car to waft about in. It’s a shame the engine in the hybrid model sounds so coarse when you’re accelerating, spoiling the serenity.

The C-Class Estate is whisper quiet and super comfortable once you reach the national speed limit, though getting up to speed does ruin the refinement as the engine thrums through the cabin. It’s not much fun on a country lane either, though if you fancy chucking the C-Class into fast bends it’ll do it with no fuss; it’s stable, just not thrilling.

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The Mercedes C-Class Estate starts at just under £48,000, around £4,000 more than a BMW 3 Series Touring and £2,500 more than the Audi A5 Avant. For that you get a more comfortable experience than in the BMW and more practicality than the Audi, but it’s no better equipped than its counterparts.

You get a sporty body kit as standard, as well as posh ambient lighting, heated front seats, wireless phone charging, LED headlights and a rather nifty integrated cargo divider net that rolls into the rear seat backs - handy when carrying lots of luggage.

Mercedes has done a great job of designing the C-Class Estate for comfort, but it’s stable, rather than fun, on a twisty road

In town

The C-Class Estate does a fantastic job of cosseting you around town, because it’s one of the most comfortable small wagons on sale. It even runs the larger, posher E-Class and S-Class models for their money.

The suspension is only ever unsettled by the sharpest, most jagged potholes - which thud through the cabin - but otherwise the C-Class soaks up speedbumps and dips in the road with ease. The light steering makes it a breeze to thread around town too, and the gear changes are smooth - especially in the PHEV model where the motor keeps you accelerating when the car is swapping cogs.

Another benefit of the hybrid model is the powerful electric motor, which makes for a quick, easy getaway from the lights. The engine is rather coarse when it kicks in though, as it neither sounds nor feels smooth under load.

All-round visibility is great and the light steering makes parking a doddle, alongside the standard-fit rear view cameras and 360-degree parking sensors - though they are a bit oversensitive, which can play tricks on your perception.

You get a standard-fit self-parking mode too, but it’s not the smartest unit out there. Our test car thought there were a few parking spaces perpendicular to the road, which would have parked us inside a cafe. The grabby brakes don’t help either, because it’s hard to moderate just how much you’re slowing down.

On the motorway

The C-Class Estate excels at motorway cruises, because that comfortable suspension does an even better job of ironing out bad road surfaces at high speed than it does around town.

Motorway ruts are floated over, and the driving experience can only be described as a high-speed glide. There’s very little wind noise - though there is a bit of a hum from the rear tyres on the roughest sections of road.

The cruise control is easy to use, with a swipe-up, swipe-down control for your speed on the otherwise annoying touch-sensitive steering wheel spokes.

Complaints? You don’t get adaptive cruise as standard and the brake pedal is devoid of feel, even at motorway speeds.

PHEV models suffer from the noisy engine note when getting up to high speed, but once you’re there they become whisper-quiet, and in battery charge-hold mode it’ll still cut the engine altogether when coasting to maximise fuel economy and recharge the battery. Smart.

On a twisty road

The flipside to the C-Class Estate’s comfort is most noticeable on a country lane, because it doesn’t come close to having the BMW 3 Series Touring’s sporty edge to the way it drives.

While it’s not off-putting, the steering doesn’t provide enough feedback to give you an accurate idea of what the front wheels are doing on faster bends, but there’s plenty of grip and not too much body lean either.

Putting the car into Sport mode makes the steering a bit heavier and the throttle a bit sharper, but overall it doesn’t do too much to change the C-Class’s character.

Space and practicality

A spacious cabin with lots of storage and a well-sized boot - but that capacity suffers a lot in PHEV models

It’s easy to get comfortable in the C-Class Estate, with highly adjustable, part-electric front seats and lots of movement in the steering wheel. The driver’s footwell is a bit cosy though; a piece of trim at the top stops you from putting your foot flat against the oddly short footrest.

Behind the smart design is a very practical interior, too, because you get large door bins, a well-sized glovebox and not one but two hidden compartments in the centre console.

The cubby beneath the infotainment display houses two cupholders - with pop-out grips to hold your drink, a wireless phone charging pad and a storage space for odds and sods. The second space is between the seats, felt-lined and it pops open at the push of a button - though it’s annoyingly easy to knock it open with your elbow.

Space in the back seats

Passengers in the back have plenty of space to get comfortable, especially with the panoramic roof fitted which actually adds an extra inch of headroom in the C-Class Estate model, as it (just about) goes over the rear passengers’ heads.

Particularly tall adults might feel their hair being ruffled by the headliner, but you get plenty of legroom and foot space to make up for it. The central armrest folds down and features a clever pop-out phone holder/cupholder combo.

The door bins are well-sized, easily holding a water bottle, and the rear vent/storage tray panel in front of the seats looks like a shocked face, which is amusing.

Boot space

The C-Class Estate has a well-sized boot at 490 litres, only 10 litres behind the BMW 3 Series but around 40 litres bigger than the Audi A5 Avant.

It’s a usefully-square space, with a removable parcel shelf cover that lifts up when the tailgate is opened and a standard-fit net that reels into the seat backs, dividing the boot from the rear seats. It’s a great feature, especially when you’re loading items up to the roof, preventing them from flying into the cabin. There’s a handy pair of buttons to fold the rear seat backs down, too.

PHEV models’ boot space is really poor though, with the under-floor batteries actually raising the boot floor up above the load lip. There’s a visible edge you need to lift items over, and the 360-litre capacity is less than you get in some family hatchbacks.

The C-Class Estate manages to capture the poshness of its more expensive Mercedes counterparts with its cabin, and it’s a very classy way to travel.

While the design may not be as futuristic as the 3 Series Touring with its super-widescreen, curved display, the Mercedes looks more elegant - and blows the Audi A5 Avant’s awkward triple-screen setup out of the water.

The portrait-oriented infotainment screen is crisp to look at, but it can be annoying to use on the move because there are a lot of menus and sub-menus to work through, and the touchscreen climate controls are fiddly as well.

The steering wheel controls are a bit of a faff too, because you’ve got four spokes with touch-sensitive, swipe-able pads to wrap your head around. They’re easy enough to use once you learn how, but they’re unintuitive to pick up on; only the cruise control spoke comes naturally.

While there are plenty of plush, trimmed surfaces high-up in the cabin and the swoopy dashboard and intricate vents all look great, the glossy plastics feel a bit cheap and the lower doors and centre console are all a bit scratchy to the touch. A BMW 3 Series feels more solid inside.

Mercedes offers a wide range of engines for the C-Class Estate, either in mild hybrid (MHEV) or plug-in hybrid (PHEV) forms. There are a quad of diesel and petrol MHEVs, from the entry-level C200 petrol and C220d to the faster C300 petrol and performance-topping C300d diesel version.

Mercedes claims the MHEV petrols will return around 42mpg, while the diesels should see between 53-60mpg.

You can opt for a PHEV in petrol or diesel - the latter being an incredibly rare choice - with both the C300e petrol and C300de claiming around 68 miles of range, and in our testing we found around 50 miles achievable with sensible driving.

We achieved a staggering 66.9mpg on the motorway in hybrid mode in our C300e test car, with 42% of the journey being completed in electric mode. That’s still some way down on the ludicrous 123mpg claimed by Mercedes, but impressive nonetheless.

You’ll have to pay the luxury car tax on all C-Class Estate models between years two-six because they all cost well over the threshold amount, but road tax is similar for all models, somewhere around the middle bands of the Vehicle Excise Duty scale.

Company car drivers will want a PHEV model, as the electric range means they fall into one of the lowest bands for Benefit in Kind duty payments.

Euro NCAP awarded a full five-star rating when the C-Class was crash tested in 2022, with hugely impressive scores of 93% for adult occupant and 89% for child occupant safety.

All C-Class Estates come with emergency brake assist, lane-keep assist, blind-spot assist and a driver monitoring system as standard, as well as a very clever airbag system - including a setup which has been designed to move you away from a side collision.

Mercedes came an impressive second place in the 2025 Driver Power survey for owner satisfaction, beating out all of its equally posh competitors - even Lexus, with its stellar reputation for quality.

We’ve not heard any horror stories about the C-Class’s reliability, and Mercedes offers a three-year, unlimited-mileage warranty which ought to give you some peace of mind. That’s on par with BMW, but you can extend your Mercedes warranty up to 120,000 miles and nine years from the car’s date of manufacture.