Before the recession, Mercedes-Benz had no trouble selling 34,000 MLs in the U.S. For 2011, the company鈥檚 best-known SUV is back on track to hit 30,000 sales. Right now, in fact, ML sales are up 14.5 percent. 鈥淚t puts us in a funny position,鈥?confesses Mercedes U.S.A. CEO Ernst Lieb. 鈥淲e鈥檙e spending millions to replace a car that remains a huge profit center.鈥?It鈥檚 like replacing Yankee Stadium鈥檚 hot dogs with, say, toaster waffles. Are you sure you want to mess with a good thing? That鈥檚 nonetheless what Mercedes is doing with its third-gen M-class, which, we hasten to add, resembles wieners and waffles only in its ability to cause customers to queue up. This new ML is about an inch longer and a half-inch wider, and it squats 0.8-inch lower than before. Cargo capacity behind the rear seat has grown seven cubic feet. The baseball bat of a turn-signal/wiper stalk thankfully has been moved to the 10-o鈥檆lock position on the steering column, and its cruise-control function has been relegated to a second stalk at 8 o鈥檆lock. Unfortunately, you鈥檒l still find yourself flicking at the column-mounted gear selector whenever you desire wipers.

On road, we drove a gas-powered ML350 with the Dynamic Handling package. 5150 option includes the Active Curve System (ACS), which decouples the anti-roll bars both off-road and during straight-ahead freeway slogs. We never felt it coupling or decoupling. We never felt it doing much of anything, to tell the truth, although body motions were satisfactorily controlled in the hills. 73,055. As the ML negotiates turns, you can still feel huge lateral load transfers, and the seats鈥?weak bolsters further suggest that this SUV might possess grand ambitions, but handling is not among them. We鈥檒l tell you one thing: This new ML is spectacularly quiet, subjectively as quiet as, say, a Lexus LX570, thanks to high-insulation glazing and additional sealing. And the ML pretty much matches the Lexus鈥檚 memorably cushy ride, too. Suspension travel feels endless; road nastiness is filtered to a fine fare-thee-well. Unfortunately, highway textures and slip angles are likewise filtered out of the light steering, as if such information might be an affront to the driver.

The brake pedal isn鈥檛 doing much talking, either. At least interstate tracking is flawless. The seven-speed transmission鈥檚 upshifts and kickdowns are supremely gentle, and engine roar is reduced to a velvety hum seemingly emanating from an adjacent ZIP Code. Fit and finish are of a quality that should make assembly workers in storm-smacked Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, proud. For two riders, back-seat legroom is excellent, kneeroom superb, headroom vast. We nosed an ML350 BlueTec diesel off-road, through sippy holes, bogs, and ugly ruts. Over hill and dirty dale, the long-travel suspension, the silky dampers, and the rock-solid platform conspire to improve the experience. S rubber, however, is not your ally in the mud. The diesel engine definitely is an ally鈥攊t鈥檚 among the most velvety oil-burners ever installed in a passenger car. No clatter, no soot, no odor, no tactile evidence to reveal its baser origins. The driver notices only a slightly delayed throttle response, an added half-second of laziness at step-off. Eight-cylinder MLs will arrive in the first quarter of 2012. Two-wheel-drive models will follow, as will a more off-road-biased version with a terrain selector and a two-speed transfer case. Mercedes says the new ML is only a few pounds heavier than its forebear, but the vehicle feels massive, a little slow-witted, and somewhat resistant to course corrections. If you鈥檙e looking for driving gratification or personality, well, it will have to derive from the M-class鈥檚 luxurious fittings and from its soothing soundlessness. Ten minutes after climbing out, you鈥檒l remember the awesome stereo more than any dynamic merits. Sometimes progress smells like waffles.

By using a unique split sway bar as a part of the Active Curve system, engineers managed to create a suspension that caters to drivers needs on an impressive level. The bars are separated into two halves with a hydraulic coupling in the middle. While driving in a straight line, the coupling is open, allowing each wheel to quickly react to changes in the road surface. Should the road turn twisty and the driver begin sawing on the wheel, however, the coupling closes, effectively creating a solid bar and increasing the vehicle's stability. Unfortunately, our tester wasn't equipped with the swank new sway bars, but that doesn't mean that the base ML350 BlueTec 4Matic is a slouch on the road. The 455 lb-ft of torque comes on nearly instantaneously from just 1,600 rpm, allowing the seven-speed automatic transmission to hold gears without having to reach for multiple downshifts. With all of the torque we could want on hand and an incredibly smooth-running 3.0-liter engine out front, the diesel is a smart-driving cruiser that can soak up miles of interstate.