Mercedes stretched the GLE for China and moved it out of Alabama
A GLE with 120 mm more wheelbase, built in Beijing and thinking in Chinese
Mercedes-Benz has started selling the GLE L in China, the first GLE ever built there. The long version stretches the wheelbase to 3,115 mm, comes off the BBAC line in Beijing rather than the Tuscaloosa plant that has supplied China until now, and carries Chinese software for both its driver assistance and its voice assistant. Europe keeps the standard car.
The GLE L's 3,115 mm wheelbase sits 20 mm short of a GLS
The GLE L adds 120 mm between the axles, taking the wheelbase from 2,995 mm to 3,115 mm, which leaves it 20 mm shy of the seven-seat GLS. It is a stretch of a stretch: Mercedes planned a 2,935 mm short GLE for this generation, dropped it, and sold the long one worldwide. The extra length goes into the second row, where Mercedes quotes 1,020 mm of rear cabin length and fits the front passenger seat with a 10.91-degree forward tilt borrowed from the Maybach GLS to free up space behind it.
GLE 350 L and 450 L: a 258 hp four-cylinder wears the 350 badge
Two versions are on sale. The GLE 350 L 4MATIC uses the 2.0-litre M254 Evo four-cylinder with 258 hp and 400 Nm, an engine badged C 300 in a European C-Class. The GLE 450 L 4MATIC gets the 3.0-litre M256 Evo straight-six with 381 hp, 560 Nm and an electric auxiliary compressor. Both have variable torque split, ADS+ adaptive dampers and Airmatic air suspension that lifts the body 30 mm off-road for 271 mm of ground clearance. For a car built in China, Mercedes lists the anti-corrosion spec down to 142.76 metres of PVC seam sealing and 1.7 litres of cavity wax.
Momenta and Doubao replace the software Europe's Mercedes runs
The GLE L's Level 2++ point-to-point navigation assistance runs on software from Momenta, the Chinese autonomy company Mercedes already uses on its China-built CLA, and new functions will arrive over the air. The voice assistant is built on Doubao, ByteDance's large language model, with an animated character called Little Benz on the display. In Europe, the refreshed C-Class draws on ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing and Google Gemini for the same job. The rear seat gets a redesigned entertainment system with gesture control and a camera that reads the passengers' mood, double-glazed acoustic glass all round and micro-LED headlamps with a 600-metre high-beam reach.
Beijing replaces Tuscaloosa after a 25 percent tariff on US-built SUVs
Mercedes disclosed the €1.8 billion China plan, with a locally built long-wheelbase GLE at its centre, in September 2024, when the stretch was expected to be around 300 mm rather than the 120 mm that emerged. The trade war then made the decision look prescient. In February 2025 China added 10 percent to the duty on US-built cars with engines above 2.5 litres, taking the total to 25 percent, and at the peak of that year's escalation the retaliatory rate on American-built vehicles passed 100 percent. A GLE 450 L built in Beijing pays none of that. BBAC, the joint venture with BAIC, is now Mercedes' largest plant anywhere, and its local range grows from 14 models to 20 by 2027, seven of them China-only.
Mercedes' China sales fell 30 percent to 98,600 cars in Q2 2026
The car lands in a market Mercedes is losing. Passenger car sales in China dropped 30 percent to 98,600 units in the second quarter of 2026, while Europe grew 4 percent and the United States 10 percent. In 2023 China took 737,200 Mercedes passenger cars against 659,400 for the whole of Europe. BMW has had an answer in the segment since 2022, when it began building a stretched X5 in Shenyang, and its next long-wheelbase X5 arrives in early 2027 with a 3,165 mm wheelbase, 50 mm more than the GLE L.
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Mercedes is four years behind BMW on this car, and the GLE L says so in millimetres. BMW has built a stretched X5 in China since 2022, and the one due in 2027 outreaches the GLE L by 50 mm. What Mercedes has changed is not the metal but the brains: a GLE whose lane-keeping comes from Momenta and whose voice runs on ByteDance's Doubao is a Mercedes built to be judged by Chinese standards, because in China those are the only standards still selling cars.
Mercedes reports full-year 2026 deliveries in the second week of January, and by then the GLE L will have had a full quarter on sale. If China is still down by double digits in the fourth quarter, the wheelbase was never the problem and the €1.8 billion bought a bigger version of the wrong answer. If the fall narrows to single digits, the GLE L will have earned a stay of execution for the idea that a German SUV can still be localised its way out of trouble.
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