First Drive: 2014 Mercedes-Benz S550
It lacks a kitchen sink.
There was already a lot going on in the S-class. In the latest version, almost every system has been improved, most of them having nothing to do with the traditional notion of a car.
The car part is relatively unchanged: The 4.7-liter V8 and seven-speed automatic transmission are essentially carry-over parts, with a little output tweak and updated shift logic. The wheelbase is the same as before. The biggest mechanical change is a switch to electric power steering. It improves efficiency but doesn’t really hurt steering feel, since the S-class never really had a ton. That would have been intrusive, antithetical to its nature.
The electric steering allows one of the larger leaps this car makes: It’ll steer itself for up to 10 seconds, and do so in a more advanced way and in more situations than all other active-steering cars, thanks to tons of sensors monitoring near and far. Given the right conditions, the S-class is capable of sustaining autonomous mode indefinitely, but our rules and regs won’t allow it. Yet. (First to jailbreak the new S-class wins.)
The list of automotive firsts does go on indefinitely. It loses all of its incandescent bulbs for LEDs. That goes for the headlights and taillights, the interior lamps, even the bulbs lighting the trunk. Various optional rear-seat packages include seat-belt buckles that pop up from the seat and illuminate for convenience, a reclining seat with an airbag cushion that prevents submarining under the seat belt, and the belt itself is an airbag. Cabin air gets filtered, ionized, and run past a perfume canister in the glove box. Pre-Safe, Mercedes’s collision-mitigation and –avoidance suite, gets so many updates we’ll suffice it to say that you’d probably be safer getting into an accident in a new S-class every day for a year than taking your chances in some other car.
In addition to making you safer, the car can see into the future to make you more comfortable. A pair of cameras reads the road ahead to detect bumps. When it does, it pulls damper pressure on the necessary wheel or wheels to keep the car dead flat. It doesn’t work on every bump, but when it does it’s eerie, assuming you even notice the bumps yourself. We had to retrace our path with the system on and then off to be sure.
If we had to find one flaw in the futuristic car that drives itself, it’d be that it takes over too seamlessly. It creates and reinforces a bad habit of forgetting to drive. Scary, but thankfully it pinch hits just fine.
But if the new S-class didn’t move, it’d still be great.
The seats offer improved massage thanks to focused air bladders and heat, mimicking a hot-stone treatment. Instead of the mix of screens and black-panel gauges of the previous S-class, the information has gone all-digital. The gauge package is twinned with an equally huge center COMAND display; imagine two iPads set in the side of a piano. You get to make so many decisions while at the wheel, including at times whether or not to be touching the wheel. But there’s a simplicity that remains in the restyled switchgear and interior layout that hides most of those choices from you if aren’t in a deciding mood.
The S-class has a habit of not only forecasting the future of Mercedes cars but the future of driving. It may not shock you to learn that the future doesn’t necessarily include participation. But you’ll be happy to learn that in the S-class it will at least be safer, sleeker, and more comfortable. And it’ll smell pleasant.
In short, the S550 can do just about anything a car can do, except be a convertible. But we’re told that’s on the S-class’s to-do list as well.
Note: Yes, we realize the car in these photos is badged S500 and not S550. That’s just the Europeans being slightly modest about their 4.7-liter V8; as before, the European S500 has the same engine as the American S550.
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