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That is right. This was important to me as well and was a gating question before I went ahead with the purchase.

I had inquired the same with my dealer and he had received similar confirmation from Mercedes India. Email correspondence below. The fuel lid doesn’t say so because they’ve not got done the paperwork yet to have it officially certified to state so (pic attached).

Hello,

Quick question about the roller sunblind for the panoramic roof.
Do you feel the blind is too transparent/thin and too much heat always comes into the cabin?
Does anyone have any specific solution?

Applying any transparent sun protection film on the panoramic sunroof would work?
Don't want to reduce the light coming through the sunroof but would like to reduce the heat. Any suggestions on this front?

Appreciate your inputs.

Thanks.

If anyone interested in the updated GLC 2024, there are some good discounts going on by cash and free insurance as well. This is for Chennai. Fyi. The reason is that MB has some celebrations going on related to some anniversary it seems. It's hard to believe. Looks like BMW is selling globally more than MB.

Quick update. Now Mercedes Dashcam is back in stock/available and can be fitted! Will provide all the details about the experience of owning a GLC once I have completed about 2K km.

BTW, a lesson learned. Bought a VIOFO 4K A 229 Pro 2CH in Jan 2024 and tried to get it installed by a third party, which was a mistake, The ASC refused to fix some fitment adjustments (to the roof liner) saying they don't support third-party equipment or installations (fair enough).

Finally, I had to bite the bullet and go with the OEM dashcam (much higher cost). I guess the lesson learned was that if OEM is offering an accessory, then best to stick to that (to be fair to me, OEM did not mention the availability of the dashcam when I took delivery).

This is good to know. Can you please share some details of the accessory including the cost etc?

Even I’m not keen to install an aftermarket on a complex new Mercedes and may just decide to bite the bullet and pay for the overpriced OEM version if the cost is palatable.

I feel it’s too thin too although haven’t faced a heat problem per se. I’ve never tried this but intuitively, I would imagine applying any transparent sun protection film on the panoramic sunroof as you indicated should work.

Hi Axe77,
The cost of the dashcam is about Rs.75,000; additionally, they charged Rs. 9,900 for fitment. It is a dual channel (front and rear) offering, both cams are Full HD quality (1920x1080). Plus parking monitoring & recording (motion and vibration sensor based). 5GHz wireless connection, copying to a smartphone is fast. It records Location, Speed, and Date & Time.

I am not able to figure out how to get to the rear cam recordings (download), though I can see them in the Mercedes dashcam app.

One drawback is that the memory card is only 32GB capacity, we can't use external SD cards is what the ASC explained.

Please recommend an iPad car mount for the rear seats for the new GLC. The usual ones available online don't seem to be a good fit as the Rod stays aren't there for a car mount to be hooked to. I have attached a picture for reference.

Had a look at the new GLC this weekend at the nearby Mercedes dealer. Was driving by to stretch the legs of my BMW M340i. Saw this black GLC on display at Titanium Motors on OMR went in to have a look at it. It was a Sunday morning and there was hardly anyone at the dealership. The Sales Agent who was quite friendly and knowledgeable showed me around the car. Some observations below:

• The car looks stunning in Obsidian Black, with all the chrome and silver elements sharply contrasting with the Car body.
• The paint quality is top notch and the car is finished on the exterior really well
• What you notice first is the imposing grill with the massive, three-pointed star. Overall, the car has flowing proportions that are well coordinated, with lots of rounded corners and curvy lines and hardly any straight edges.
• I was surprised to see the LED headlight of a reflector type, and not the projector type that one would expect in a car like this. It does not appear that Mercedes has tried to cut costs in any other part of the vehicle. So there must be a reason by they went for reflector LEDs in this car for India
  
  
  
  
  
• The car looks purposeful and sporty when viewed from the back. The broad base and the noticeably tapering/narrower upper body, convey a sense of stability and dynamism.
  
  
  
• The car appears significantly longer and wider than the previous generation GLC and is close to the previous generation GLE in terms of size, except in terms of height. I thought the car could be taller given the segment it competes in. It is only about as tall as the Creta/Seltos.
  
  
  
• The alloy wheel looks real sweet. The alloy wheel pattern is neither too much in your face, nor too regular and dull. The contrasting black and steel color bands look lovely.
• The wheels are a sensible size, with 19 inch rims and 55 profile tires. Importantly, the tires are not run flat, they are tubeless Continentals with a 235/55R 19 size. After having driven around with 35 profile run-flat tires in my M340i, I think this looks like a very welcome comfort sizing. It is a pity that the car does not have adaptive dampers, that would have been a very good addition to this car which prides itself to be equally good on bad roads and no roads.
  OT - I don’t know why BMW keeps going for ever larger rims and ever smaller tire profiles. This is a bad idea for Indian roads. I already have one case of my run flat getting torn torn after passing through a pothole at not too high a speed.
  
  
  
  
• The car looks its best from the rear three quarters, with that dynamic and flowing shape at its best and it does look imposing from this angle.
  
  
  
• On a 90 lakh OTR car, not having comfort access is quite a shock. This is probably related to recent incidents in Europe, where Car hackers stole cars through a method called key hacking (https://www.mercedesonlease.co.uk/wh...to-prevent-it/ ) by hacking and copying the key's signal. The pre-facelift BMW 3-series also omitted comfort access perhaps for this reason.
• Imagine having to fish out the key every single time to get in and To lock the car at the end of the trip. Especially as the Mercedes GLC key is big and heavy. There is obviously no NFC key or Software key available, without comfort access.
• It is great to see that Mercedes is now including concealed space for a spare tire in the trunk. The loading bay is flat, and the boot space is massive. They could have easily fitted a small third of seats in there - the boot is that long! Though, of course, no one would want it in this segment.
• With the second row of seats also reclined, one can easily carry a bike without disassembling in the back of the this car. There are switches to flip down the second row from the boot, which is convenient.
  
  
  
  
  
• The back seat is quite firm and although the there is sufficient amount of legroom, there isn’t enough thigh support and the seat back recline is not very much and is actually a touch upright. The quality of materials is top notch. One would be hard put to guess that this is not real leather.
• I do wish was a bit more cushioning built into the arm rest areas in the doors, including the driver side door. Although there is a slight bit of padding, it does feel inadequate and a bit hard for long distance use.
  
  
  
• The screen beneath the sunroof feels like it’s just a piece of cloth. It is so thin and lets everything in, including the light and the heat. BMW do a much better job here, with their sunroof screens that are thick and opaque so that you can use the sunroof when you really want it, and conveniently forget it exist when you don’t.
• Overall, the back seat is a good place for medium sized adults who don’t mind a firm seating surface and sitting a bit upright. Not one for the chauffer driven, they have many better choices in this price range.
  
• The driver seat has a massive range of adjustment. Everything is controlled by the haptic touch based switchgear on the door. I tried the bling feature to enter my height and have the seat set up automatically by Mercedes. However, this makes a seat go too far back and too low for my liking, I had to take back manual controls to find the position I liked.
  
  
  
• The steering wheel has a luxurious feel, although it does feel a bit thin for my larger hands. The touch base controls seem to work OK but I’m sure one would need quite some time to get used used to them as they are quite small and not easy to read.
• The dash surface with art leather surfaces and brown stitching feels really luxurious. The pinstripe pattern on the fake wood is also very unique.
  
  
  
  
• The instrumentation display is lovely. It’s really high resolution and the choice of displays felt better than BMW’s with the traditional circular two-dial speedo and tacho combination available.
• The display is highly customizable and has a very rich feature set. The SA told me that Apple maps can be displayed on the main console but not Google maps - would like to verify that.
• The central tablet-like screen feels well-positioned and is just about the right size, so that it is not too much in the face. Everything was very slick to operate with a very fast touch response time.
  
  
  
  
  

I made a mental note to take a test drive sometime soon. The Petrol engine plus mild hybrid seems like a pretty potent combination, doing 0-100 in 6.2 seconds. This level of acceleration rivals even the best petrol sedans in the price range (The BMW 330i is now long wheelbase and takes the same 6.2 seconds, the C-Class has just the 200 tune and takes 7.9 seconds while the Audi A4 takes 7.3 seconds)

Overall a very luxuriously appointed SUV, with a few quirks, like the lack of adaptive suspension (the biggest downer for me), absence of comfort access and an average back seat. It is quite pricey at 75 lakhs ex-showroom.

I was involved in the design of the above headlights in 2019-2020 and we designed two variants for the GLC, the reflector one and one with the lenses, with Digital Lighting.



The digital one costs nearly double the base headlight



My guess is that someone at Mercedes India decided to go with the lower variant to keep the entry cost lower, probably specc'ing the car with other packages, which add more value in terms of comfort or driver assistance. The Digital Light headlights have a lot of tech going on behind the lenses, for corner illumination, glare reduction etc, making them quite expensive.

It's a simple case of it being the standard headlights available on the GLC worldwide. The fancy digital lights are an expensive option that they don't bring to the normal models in India.





There are two upgrade packages for the headlight globally.


To be honest, that's tall enough. The newer German SUVs seem somewhat squat/short compared to others for better aerodynamics and handling. If you see a GLS and bmw X7 in traffic, you will find that the average fortuner/thar etc just seem to tower over them in height despite being much smaller in every other regard. I think the bottom heavy design also plays a visual illusion.


What you have mentioned is a relay attack. I am afraid the dealership gave you their usual spiel about how cost cutting is actually a feature. On Mercedes keyfobs with comfort access, you can disable keyless entry by just pressing the lock button twice. Also unlike mass market cars, their keyfobs have a motion sensor in them that turns it off automatically if it's placed down somewhere. So no theft while you are sleeping with your keys on your night stand. It will reactive only when it's moving around like when it's in your pocket.

Comfort access is another package that is only offered on the CBU models or on the S class here. It's not just merc, it's every german manufacturer sadly. Another way for them to cut costs so they can offer more ambient lighting.

That's not correct, to be fair to them. The dealer had no idea why it was missing and was apologetic. I was just curious why it was not offered and tried to do some digging on the web.

I disagree with your assumption that cost cutting is the reason here, as the car is so loaded with every feature you can imagine and keyless entry is a pretty cheap feature to implement, it is present even on sub 10 lakh cars. Whatever is their true rationale, who knows, but it is pretty odd.

In Europe, they follow this as an upselling marketing strategy. For illustration, this is how it works. Offer the car with a reflector headlamp setup as standard, which on many counts looks out of place or downright cheap. And then offer a technologically advanced headlamp (the right fit for the brand) as an optional extra. Now all optional extra items have a high price markup to make money.

A similar case can be seen with alloy wheels as well; smaller-sized (17”, 18” in Europe) standard alloy wheels are mostly dull-looking, but larger-sized optional alloy wheels have attractive designs and, of course, high markup. So all this is by design, not by default, just to make money for investors. A cheap reflector headlamp or other low-cost solution works fine in vehicles sold as fleet cars in Europe, which is a sizable market.

But the Indian product planning team can still choose what they want and configure the car as per the Indian customer’s value perception. As in India, German luxury carmakers sell cars in fixed configurations without any optional features.

Sadly, luxury carmakers in India’s current product planning heads too don’t have a fair understanding of cars per se, forget about Indian customers’ ‘need’ or ‘want’, and thus attention to detail like what role headlamps play in a real-world scenario, say nighttime highway driving, is always missing. So Indian luxury car customers get cars with those shortcomings—no keyless entry in a ₹ 80 lakh car.

Has anyone bought a car cover for the new GLC 300? I was looking for one on Amazon but seems like all fit the older version which is 60mm shorter. Reached out to NeoDrift, and they also don't have one for the new model. Looks like the only option is to go with the OEM cover which has a huge Mercedes star/Logo on it, I would prefer not to advertise there is a Merc under the cover while parking in public parking spaces for a couple of days (like Airport parking or large resort parking spaces).

Nice review of the GLC. In process of selling my 2019 GLC 220d. Does anyone else find that the Artico fake leather seats are very hard and make your back very sweaty and clammy?

An important update re my GLC as well as some other newer Mercedes models.

1. Recall notice: System validation (80A fuse)

I got the attached letter (pic below) for checking and replacing the 80A fuse. Mostly self explanatory.



2. Active Brake Assist: Important setting update
More importantly, there was an update which has ensured that the car remembers the last setting on autonomous braking - i.e. if you have set Auto braking to “off” it will remain off till you change it otherwise regardless of restarting the car. This is HUGELY convenient because otherwise every time you start the car you had to go through three levels of menus to switch the damn thing off.

I believe they have got this update for all their newer models - off hand I recall him saying it applies to the new C, GLC, GLE and I think the A class.

GLC or other owners who might have their newer models may want to check with their local authorised workshops to get this update installed. Personally it’s a huge convenience for me at least as I was always driving with this feature disabled.

EDIT: I hadn’t noticed earlier but this is the email I received re point number 2. FYI.