The Mercedes S-Class creates a luxury cocoon for its occupants, and other manufacturers should take note. But it poses one problem: what car can an owner follow it up with?
Having had the Mercedes S-Class for more than a year now, it’s time to move on, although the challenge lies in how to move forward from a car that is, in many ways, the perfect luxury machine. Spending so much time with a car doing the unglamorous, everyday things that, sadly, most driving involves leads me to certain reflections on what makes the ideal 21st century urban luxury car.
Readers and manufacturers are invited to take note. Firstly, it’s all about the ride. We live in an era of increasingly uncomfortable cars. It’s a sort of antiprogress: a car that you might have thought rides slightly firmly in the 1980s is positively smooth compared to most cars today. I have been chauffeured in enough other large German saloons to despair at the philosophy that inspires the creation of a luxury car that rolls down the road with all the bump absorption of a skateboard.
Cars are now heavier and more powerful than ever before, so a firmer suspension is required to keep them in check around corners, which is fine, but one suspects cars are also made ‘sporting’ because that’s what motoring journalists like.
I wonder if anyone except motoring journalists has ever driven an S320 CDI as if it were a sports car; we owners want the smoothest ride possible. And that’s the joy of the S Class. London roads that are bumpy in most other cars are mirror smooth in this one. My back loves the car, and credit to Mercedes for building a car for the people who buy it, not the reviewers. (The fact that the S Class is actually pretty good to drive fast is an added bonus.) Luxury is all about feel. Watch manufactures understood this decades ago, which is why your Cartier Roadster has chronograph buttons that click with a satisfyingly solid feel. Once upon a time any expensive car worth its salt would have beautifully finished chromed switches, toggles and buttons.
You spend a significant part of your life inside a car: where are your hands going to be, and what signal are they giving to your brain about the quality of your environment? It appears a simple equation to solve, but car manufacturers seem happy to spend money developing wacky door mirrors or swooping spoilers, without worrying that the indicator stalk has the feel of a McDonald’s plastic straw; or that your spare arm will spend its time touching a piece of material that feels like papier-mache.
The switches in my S-Class feel like they are honed by watch manufacturers. In a traffic jam, my right arm rests on a piece of leather so soft I want to curl up on it and the door handle feels like it comes from a Swiss bank vault.
People who sell you watches for £5,000 know how important this is, so I’m amazed that so few car makers who sell machines that cost more than ten times that much understand. Note to manufacturers: the fact that it works isn’t enough, otherwise we’d all be wearing Casios and driving Hyundais.
So what could follow up the detailed brilliance of the S-Class? Something equally luxurious and advanced, only perhaps a little smaller for ease of use in town. Something devised with the comfort of its owner in mind, rather than getting the fastest time around a racetrack that no owner would ever use. The answer came in a flash of insight, after an extended and supremely comfortable test drive in perhaps the most advanced luxury car on the road. Watch this space... – Darius Sanai