You’ll soon be able to drive off the lot in your Mercedes-Benz with an HD Radio installed. The car maker announced today that the radio service will be a part of certain models, including the M-, R-, GL-, G- and E-Class.

You may remember during the continued back-and-forth surrounding the XM-Sirius merger that the HD Radio group were pestering the FCC to make HD Radio a built-in component of any new radios. The HD Radio folks had said that a combined XM-Sirius would be such a monopoly that it would kill HD Radio before it had a chance to succeed. That obviously didn’t happen.

While we wouldn’t go out of our way to buy an HD Radio, throw it in for free in a brand new car and we wouldn’t freak out.

The question now is, can we even afford a brand new Benzo?

Mercedes-Benz to factory install HD Radio [Orbitcast]