Mercedes E class Cabriolet (2010) – Air Cap

The 2010 Mercedes E Class Cabrio with AirCap deployed

The next generation Mercedes E Class Cabriolet is due to turn up at next month’s Detroit Motor Show and go on sale in the Spring in the UK – just in time for some open-topped motoring as the sky clears and the sun starts to shine (or it pours with rain – global warming, don’t you know).

Which is all fine and dandy if you’re just cruising round town at low speeds and you’ve got hats on, otherwise the expensive coiffures of your passengers may well get wrecked by the buffeting once the roof is down as you blat along, leaving them looking as if they’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. But not any more.

Mercedes engineers have come up with something called AirCap, which is a shiny black gizmo that rises from the top of the windscreen when the roof is down (you choose whether to deploy it or not) and fools the car in to acting as if the roof were still in place by shifting the air flow upwards by 20cm.

But the AirCap is not just a lump of plastic with a motor attached. Mercedes say it took 3000 hours for their engineers to develop, consists of 211 different parts and 44 different materials and has been tested through 10,000 cycles. So, not just a lump of plastic with a motor then.

The AirCap isn’t the most visually appealing piece of kit we’ve ever seen, although it’s hard to argue with if it works as well as it seems to. The key is the ability to deploy the AirCap manually. I can’t see too many E Class Cabrio owners wanting to cruise round town with it deployed, making their sleek new Cabrio look like it’s been visited by the Halford’s Fairies. But for a cruise down the motorway it would be ideal.

Then again, you could just put the roof back up.

By Cars UK