A major problem of infotainment in the past has been that it forces owners into one particular type of interface. If there’s a touchscreen, you use that. If there’s a knob and dial, you use that – owners use infotainment the way the engineers want them to, rather than the way that feels natural.

Rather than just one or two interfaces, MBUX has four. Voice controls are the most noteworthy, but it’s possible to never speak a word to your Mercedes and still get by without trouble. The new trackpad takes the place of the traditional COMAND knob and dial, and it’s a delight, accepting smartphone-like gestures to control the central 10.3-inch display. That same display is also a touchscreen, offering excellent response times in addition to attractive graphics. And if you’d rather keep your hands on the wheel, MBUX works via a pair of touch pads on each spoke, like those on the current E-Class.

This kind of freedom is a huge part of what makes MBUX so easy to learn – it doesn’t pigeonhole owners into one particular kind of use.

Reconfigurable gauges aren’t a new thing, but MBUX takes them to an almost ridiculous degree. Alongside the three preset gauge modes – Modern Classic, Sport, and Understated – each cluster design has its own array of information and the choice of minimized or full-screen displays for things like navigation, driver assistance, and overall efficiency.

While you can switch between the different displays independently, they’re also linked to the drive mode. And if that’s not enough, MBUX offers “themes,” presets that bundle different gauge settings and ambient light settings so users can quickly make sweeping changes. While we didn’t play with them too much, MBUX also allows users to create their own themes.

Anyone that’s watched an Apple keynote over the past year or two has had to hear about augmented reality. It’s supposedly the future, and while using AR for games and pictures is all well and good, MBUX is the first time we’ve ever experienced augmented reality and said, “Wow, that’s really cool.”

MBUX’s optional AR system uses a front-facing camera in tandem with the navigation system. The camera switches on at low speeds (and when a destination is programmed into the navigation) and then displays street names and navigation directions over the video feed. This is a lifesaver in an unfamiliar city or on roads where the street signs are obscured – it gave us much more confident when driving around Seattle during the A-Class launch.

We’re eager to get the new Mercedes-Benz A-Class into the office, if only because it will give us more time to sift through MBUX. This is a deep, occasionally complicated system, and our brief drive around Seattle didn’t provide enough time to find a setup that works for our driving needs, that can show all the information we want without cluttering up the display with things we don’t.

We’re hoping this was a pre-production software problem, but throughout our drive of the MBUX-equipped A-Class, the navigation system routinely doled out directions late or in situations where guidance seemed like a good idea, not at all. We missed turns twice while testing the A-Class. At one point, we were ordered to turn left in a quarter of a mile, onto a freeway. The problem? The road ended in a three-way junction in barely a tenth of a mile.

In that particular situation, the right course of action wasn’t hard to figure out, but there’s no guarantee that when MBUX lists the wrong distance that it won’t be on a more complicated stretch of road and lead to a wrong turn. Again, it’s very likely this was a product of early build software, but it was worrying nonetheless.