First Drive: 2011 Mercedes-Benz E-Class Cabrio

It's a beautiful spring across the country, and everywhere people are heading out for long weekend drives to enjoy their favorite stretches of blacktop the way they were meant to be--in roadsters and convertibles. But what do you do with your drop-top when those 100-plus-degree days hit, or worse still, once the sun has retreated to the inevitable onslaught of winter? Pack it in the garage and start dreaming about next spring? Not if you're a 2011 Mercedes-Benz E-Class Cabrio owner.

Disclaimer: Mercedes-Benz flew us out to the fantastic Blackberry Farm in eastern Tennessee and gave us some pretty sweet digs, access to a personal golf cart, and stuffed us to the gills with fine wine and food. Despite their best attempts to seduce us into a romantic stupor, however, we remained faithful to our mission of delivering accurate and insightful drive reports.

That's the real magic of the 2011 E-Cabrio. It's a solidly-made and smooth-cruising car, to be sure, but it's the near-four-season capacity for comfortable top-down driving that really shines. How does it manage to deliver comfort in frosty and infernal weather alike? Through the combination of two unique features: AIRCAP and AIRSCARF.

While Mercedes has a penchant for all-caps in tech names, we're going to eschew those for the sake of sanity. The Airscarf system is something you may be familiar with from other Mercedes convertibles, but the latest generation is more flexible, offering up to 36 degrees of angle in the vent, and more powerful, providing more warmth right on the back of the neck, where it ostensibly has the most impact on comfort levels. We can vouch that it works well, as we lit out from Blackberry Farm to test the car on the winding roads to Asheville, North Carolina, early on a Thursday morning with the Smoky Mountains shrouded in mist and the temps still in the lower 50s. Retract the top, flip on the Airscarf and heat radiates comfortably down your neck, much like the virtual scarf it claims to be. Neat, but what about all that wind in your face?

That's where Aircap comes in. No, it's not a virtual ball cap; it's an incredibly complex yet brilliantly simple spoiler that raises from the top of the windows frame to divert air up and over the cabin while the top is down, creating an insulated bubble over the cabin. Covered by patent and assembled out of an astonishing 211 parts, the Aircap is the homerun-hitter of the E-Cabrio's tech offensive on excessive wind. Switch it down and air dumps into the cabin, prompting passengers to pull their coats closer and hunker down against the cold. Switch it up and not only does the wind cease, but the cabin gets noticeably quieter--quiet enough to hold conversations at normal volumes, much like in a hardtop sedan. It works best at speed, though, as we noticed the influx of cool air as we slowed to a stop at the morning's first pit stop, a scenic overlook of the mountains where we topped up on coffee and nibbles.

From there, the drive route got more interesting as the windiness factor cranked up to about 8. We weren't far from the notorious Tail of the Dragon, and though it was closed for a rockslide, there's plenty of close-seconds in the neighborhood. Driving the 268-horsepower E 350, we decided to kick it over into Sport mode and see what kind of smiles the chassis and engine could deliver. A willing engine with a sweet note and the balanced ride offer just enough sport to make a fast run through the hills enjoyable, but somewhat vague steering, a large on-center dead spot and suspension clearly biased toward the cruising end of the spectrum kept us from really flogging it, or even wanting to.