I’ve done it in other small cars so why not?
There are plenty of electric cars in that class.
Do anybody else think like me that Tesla owners are the same as the old bmw drivers
Not me anyway. 
Last time I was in Amsterdam, about four years ago, most of the taxis at the airport were Teslas. They would have been E class Mercs in the old days. I’ve never owned a BMW (the only one I ever fancied was the 2002) but I would consider a Model 3 Tesla and a very discerning pal of mine has just bought one for himself. Mrs. Bono, a very modest lady, has swapped her old Volvo for a Model three too, based on my discerning pal’s recommendation 
.
The problem that I have with Tesla’s is - you know that thing where devices that you own are not really under your control because they need software and the manufacturer is entirely in control of what the software is and does - Telsa have done that to cars. In spades.
I mean, other manufacturers also do that these days (I’m looking at you BMW, VW, etc) but non to quite the extent that Tesla does.
Yes, it’s very big brother but I doubt Tesla do it anymore than the others. I’ve a Tiguan and a Merc hybrid that call home all the time. They even get updates over the airwaves I think. I’m not sure how this all fits in with GDPR.
We were out shopping yesterday and the Tiguan got a fright when a car ahead stopped and it lashed on the brakes. It and the Merc have both given me warnings before but this was the first time either of them had taken over. I don’t really like it.
I’m happy with adaptive cruise control, but some of the other stuff is quite invasive. Of course I can always turn it off but I wonder if that will always be the case. Though a couple of years ago I was belting it for the Cherbourg ferry from Fontainebleau in foul weather and we wouldn’t have made it without the gizmos, which could see through the spray much better than I could.
I’ve driven a Tesla a reasonably long distance but I’m not that happy with letting it do the driving. Having been an assembler programmer in my youth LoL, I’m not that confident about putting my life in the hands of millions of lines of code produced by the lowest cost contractor.
Dunno - there was a row about Tesla turning off features in 2nd hand cars that had originally been paid for (though Tesla disputed that).
The BMW phones home but I think the SIM is in an accessible location so could be removed.
However there isn’t much point doing that unless I take the SIM out of my phone and turn it off as well.
Yes, that’s the problem. Even if the car doesn’t have a dedicated SIM, in order to use a lot of the features you need to pair your phone which it uses as a hotspot. Though I’m not sure that some cars don’t now have an embedded SIM, a bit like Kindle whispersync. I’m not actually sure either the Merc or the VW need my phone connected to upload data. They’d have to tell you that the car was using your data allowance for their corporate purposes, wouldn’t they?
Turning off features remotely would be a nice fiddle. Even after buying the car you they could force you to rent features. Turning the car into a nice annuity revenue stream. An attractive business model.
Recent VW’s have a SIM which can’t easily be disabled - there’s an account somewhere on the 'net of some guy’s attempts to get VW to sort this out for him (not sure if he succeeded in the end).
My BMW definitely has a SIM - I can even use it as a hotspot if I pay the (rather expensive) fee to enable that feature.
That’s my new career sorted then 
old-style Amsterdam taxi- driving here I come.
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Well if the Tiguan has a SIM then I guess the Merc certainly has one too. At least the Morgan doesn’t. Even it’s ECU is a competition one without an ODB port (much to the chagrin of CT testers). It’s updated with a good old RS232 cable. Though the Garmin GPS I use in her is probably squealing on me to somebody somewhere. At least it not Google tracking me.
The Mercedes E Class W124 is IMO possibly the toughest passenger car ever built. I had one in South Africa for a couple of years. It took us on many trips on rough dirt roads in Zimbabwe, Botswana, over the Caprivi strip into Namibia and all around South Africa without missing a beat. It forded rivers and took rock strewn tracks and deep sand in it’s stride. Mind you, it was a bit knackered at the end of the two years. But that was my employers problem, not mine.
The only vehicles I would have trusted as much as my Merc would have been a Mitsubishi Pajero, a Toyota Hilux or Landcrusier. And the Merc was only two wheel drive!
Those were the days when engineers ran Mercedes and they built cars to a standard, not to a market segment price point.
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I know it’s going a bit off topic , but when I took OH’s car for it’s CT a couple of weeks ago the very first thing the tester did was plug into the OBD port. I’d never seen that before , but it was a different testing station with a viewing window.
I think the always do it Mark,I’d say it’s handy for emissions readings etc. When I left the Morgan in for it’s last CT the guy was quite stroppy about the missing OBD port. He even showed me the hole where it used to be. Seems all cars since 2002 or something should have one. What he didn’t realise was that they might have had one in the showroom but there’s no reason to keep it once you’ve bought the car. The Morgan now has a factory fitted Omex competition ECU which has no OBD, just a dangling RS232 cable.
I’m driving my w124 now the are one more Mercdes that is better the w140
Yes, if I remember correctly it was even double glazed.
Yes and much more the say it was the last proper Mercedes before the economics took over
Yes, just it is very big. I didn’t like the quality when I bought a CLK 230 in 1998 so I traded it in for a 2000 R129 320 SL, one of the last, a V6. That was my daily driver for about seventeen years. It was built on the W124 floorpan and superbly put together. I sometimes regret having sold her but she was RHD and I wasn’t really using her enough in the end.
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