Rolling Roxy
The most technologically advanced and comprehensively co-ordinated set of environmental comfort and infotainment electronics installed in a car; the Mercedes S500L. A journey from London to Disneyland Paris via a good movie, massaging seats and an amazingly restrained right foot…
Certain things simply are. We know that great big subwoofer boxes can shake your world to bits. That ‘Dolby’ and ‘dts’ are the bee’s knees when it comes to surround sound on your DVDs. We also know that Mercedes make the most technologically advanced cars in the world.
Their technical flagship car is the S Class, with the long wheelbase S500L king of the V8s and even a lunatic S600 with twin-turbo 12-cylinder engine above that. The S500L has a five and half litre politically incorrect engine although it is incredibly efficient and such a wide selection of information, entertainment and driving/comfort features they require a two centimetre thick single-language manual. The fact stands, that in the motoring technology field as a whole, any truly important car technology will have been seen first on an S Class. Crumple zones, airbags, ABS, paddle-shift gears, all sorts of things, some of which are everywhere now, started out on ‘real’ cars, as against space-craft like Formula One race cars, on the S Class.
The sheer level of sumptuous comfort and the absurdly comprehensive nature of what is provided in the car I got to borrow, was so mad, I simply had to ask if I could take it abroad to Paris and Disneyland. What a great excuse!. So heavily loaded is the car with toys and wonderful stuff, that this ‘base’ model was priced at £78K but was in fact list priced, with the extras, at £98,020.00, although not discounting the measly twenty pounds on such a package seems a bit mean!
For one, it would be possible to go into major motoring-mag eulogy about the poor rider on the superbike at 135mph (225kph) on the bendy bit of the M20 on the way home, who simply couldn’t get rid of my traction-controlled body-stability-on-rails like presence, or the infra-red night vision, radar operated cruise control or three levels of comfort/sport or manual flip switch seven-geared nuttiness up to a limited 155mph performance but I’ll try not to. All I can say is that actually driving this huge yet monstrously powerful car was only exceeded within Disneyland Paris by the second generation of Space Mountain rides dubbed ‘Mission Two’ which I think accelerates faster. And the Merc doesn’t regularly go upside-down.
Fully Loaded
The excitement I felt at having this most expensive car I’ve ever driven to use for a week and even to be allowed to take it on the French motorway lasted all the way to the Eurotunnel terminal, where, after asking the terribly nice people of the AA about petrol prices and how the gendarmes were about motorway speeding these days, it sort of evaporated. They had locked up some man the previous week for doing 156mph and were generally sick of Britons blasting down to Paris. So I had to behave. The electronics really helped.
For all the fully loaded nature, one thing was missing that was shown as a possible in the manual, which was a separate rear-cabin DVD player and two screens in the rear headrests for the rear seat passengers. Yes, they each got a separate climate zone to heat or cool just for them, and powered ventilated/heated seats with massage function at four levels, but no DVD. I had to strap in a cheap system-in-a-bag, which my seasoned theme park expert, Simon (11) used for a games console input on the way. We drove very carefully into what seems the smallest Eurotunnel train car I have ever been in (the car is vast) and set the front DVD going. The one slot in the dash system can eat six discs, which seems one up on many home systems, which as yet don’t seem to have caught up with the six disc CD changers of old. Even so, I cannot help wonder if this is a Nakamichi mechanism as found in Lexus cars, since the discs, all six, go one at a time, through that same slot. The sound system itself is the first properly approved in car Dolby 5.1 array and is supplied by the famous Harman Kardon company who are well known for their Lexicon high end audio processors.
The car is acoustically inert, due to thick carpets, rich leather seats with perforations to allow driven ventilation through and a whole load of sound insulation from the road in the bodywork. Stepping inside is like entering a very classy leather bound library, with the associated hush factor. Shut the door and the outside world simply becomes less pressing. The dash display is partly an LCD screen, which can show the speedo and instruments or else the black and white stark night vision mode and partly another, more normal, LCD screen of decent size. (I think it might be nine inch, it’s certainly a ‘widescreen’ or 16:9 aspect ratio.) This can be motorised around to point more at the passenger or the driver and is where Europe-wide navigation or else radio/CD graphics or best of all, DVD or TV images appear. It’s called the Comand (sic) display and is used by pushing a big silver ‘puck’ shaped control piece around on its up/down, left/right and diagonal switches before you push it straight down into the leather clad panel it lives in, to confirm menu choice. It’s very intuitive and the manual is not needed if you have any basic grasp of how a menu system like on a DVD disc or iPOD, is navigated. The screen is well housed in trimmed leather and deep clear plastic-fronted binnacle and so is easy to see in any light.
Revelation
The revelation is the sound. I have heard hundreds of powerful car sound systems, some double winners in Europe-wide sound quality competitions and can tell you that the 600 watts of power and active cunning used in here to control the 14 speakers that are dotted all around the interior have been brilliantly applied. Only rarely do you get a subwoofer so well integrated that you really cannot tell from where the low tones are coming from. In case of worries of being stuck on the Eurotunnel train with a flat battery from watching too long, the electrical system in the car has both a supply and a starter battery. The car will power down systems, one at a time, as power gets lower, in space-ship like order of importance, (like blue whales do with oxygen and their brain versus muscle tissues) until you’re flat. At which point the starter battery will still get you going again. There is an enormous 180 Ampere alternator on this car to make the juice (normal cars need around 60A) and the supply battery was easily good enough for our whole park-to-depart time on the tunnel. We got right through Tim Burton’s animated Corpse Bride, which sounded scary and fulsome on DVD, with choruses of singing spooks all around the soundstage. Lovely.
In order to get best surround effect, I found that as driver, I had to lean very slightly into the axis of the car also making it more line of sight to the level placed screen, and then tip my head to the back at the left ear a tiny bit. This brought in the rears as clear and yet separate sound sources.
The whole experience, from massaging seats with three memories for different users, four sets of air-con controls and all the other stuff in those seats made those ‘Laz-E-Boy’ American comfy chairs look positively primitive. The subtle behind-wooden-trim edge lighting in the cabin could have been designed for use in classy home theatre installations, (you can set brightness and delays after certain events via the Comand system just like a fully automated living room, including the rear and side powered blinds, by the way!) The sound was capable of getting pretty potent, the TV tuner worked well when the car was pointing the right way and it felt like slumming it to go from the car’s cabin into our (perfectly lovely in fact) two star Disney Hotel Santa Fe room when we got there. I did have fun in Disneyland but my treat really began again when I felt that beautiful big old girl purr back into life under my right foot. Just once, she even spoke to me. (Oh yeah, you can voice control nearly all features in here, too, that’s another manual) It was just as we got to 135mph and started to upset the super bike rider who simply couldn’t shake us off even though he was hanging his bottom clear off the thing to get around the bend. She looked back over her shoulder and said, in a rising aggressive contralto voice, ‘Do you want to GO somewhere, then?’
A/V Features
Six Disc CD/DVD player
PCMCIA media slot
TV & FM Tuners
Motorised swivel LCD TFT screen in centre console
13 channels of power amplification: 11x40w RMS plus 2x80w rms
Fully laboratory approved Dolby 5.1 surround sound steering
Centre speaker: 100mm Ceramic Metal Matrix Diaphragm driver
Left/Right speakers: 2x43mm HF, 2x100mm mids, 2x200mm Dual voice coil low frequency CMMD drivers
Side speakers: 2x43mm HF, 2x168mm midbass CMMD drivers
Rear speakers: 2x100mm CMMD surround full range drivers
Cabin Features
Four position-powered seats with three memories for different users
Power ventilated seating, with eight-way adjustable thigh/lumbar/thorax/shoulder support system
Each seat gets full air conditioning/heating with individual temperature control
Four levels of gas-powered massage in each seat, fast, slow, gentle or intense
Powered rear blinds, side blinds and rear headrests with automatic fold out of sight in reverse
Edge-illuminated wood trim and other details, time delay controlled by user.
Fabulous double-figure in decibels sound attenuation from outside world Splendid Isolation
Does 155mph.
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