2014 Mercedes S-Class review: The best, most technologically advanced car you will ever drive
The 2014 Mercedes-Benz S-Class combines radar, cameras, and hundreds of LED lamps to provide a car that is a dream to drive, über-safe for occupants, and able to avoid jaywalking pedestrians and crossing traffic that darts in your path. Add streaming entertainment delivered through the car's integrated 3G telematics system delivered to four LCD displays, and you have the world's finest premium luxury sedan. The privilege of owning will cost you just under $100,000, more if you want options such as the hot stone massage seats, aromatherapy climate control, and the 24-speaker Burmester audio upgrade. Who says those stolid Germans don't know a thing or two about the luxe life?
The bottom line is that the Mercedes-Benz S-Class is not just the best premium luxury sedan on the market today, it is the best car you are ever likely to drive.
Among Audi, BMW, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz, the mantle of best luxury car typically goes to whoever shipped most recently. That would be Mercedes with the sixth-generation S-Class arriving in September. Mercedes piled on so many new technical features that it's not a close decision. In a car with so much tech, the biggest challenge, no surprise, is making the richness of features readily accessible to the driver and passengers. On the ease-of-use front, I believe the wizards of Stuttgart are delivering a work in progress and they'll have to take their lumps from consumer magazines who expect a car with 100 microprocessors to be fully usable the first time you set foot in the cockpit.
Maximum driver assistance: Self-driving for 15 seconds
The optional driver assistance package is a must-have if you love tech and advanced cars. It's the heart of what Mercedes calls Intelligent Drive. For the same price ($2,800) as adaptive cruise control was a decade ago, you now get a networked sensor array of radars and cameras for front, side, and rear assistance that avoids collisions and even drives the car for brief periods. Naturally there's the core functionality of stop-and-go adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection, and lane departure warning. That's the starting point. (Read: What is adaptive cruise control, and how does it work?)
The pair of optical cameras mounted a half-foot apart in the windshield mirror housing provide 3D vision to augment Mercedes' narrow-beam long range radar (out to 200 meters or 1,640 feet, equal to 18 seconds at 60 mph) and medium range wide-angle radar (200 meters or 650 feet). (Subaru also uses optical cameras for adaptive cruise control and pedestrian safety.) The 3D shaping of the optical cameras works to about 50 meters or 160 feet and can see in monovision to 500 meters or 1,640 feet. The 3D camera lets the car decide whether to key on lane markings or the car in front, and does a better job of detecting and traffic that darts across the front of the car. Here's how Intelligent Drive saves you as well as pedestrians and wayward traffic:
Adaptive cruise with steering assist and stop & go pilot
In heavy traffic in stop & go mode up to 60 kph (37 mph), the sensor combo decides whether to track the lane markings or the car in front. On a crowded highway the camera might not always see the pavement markings.
Active lane keeping assist
Not only does the car warn if you're about to cross over a lane by steering wheel vibration (no noisy beeps), it senses if the adjacent lane is occupied. If so, the front wheel opposite the hazard is lightly braked to pivot the car back into lane. On my test drive, the car does better than that: It keeps the big Benz centered in the lane, although with the lightest touch on the electric power steering, you're in control. At highway speeds, adaptive cruise plus lane keeping assist equals a self-driving car. Mercedes knows this and limits you to about 10 seconds of hands-off driving, issues a warning (a chime and an instrument panel icon of blood red hands gripping the wheel) and five seconds later ACC deactivates. So long as you keep the lightest touch on the wheel, the car seems happy. It will handle curves of up to 15 degrees.
Brake Assist Plus with cross traffic assist, Pre-Safe Brake with pedestrian detection, Pre-Safe Plus
Brake Assist Plus watches for crossing traffic (a car that ran a stop sign) or an oncoming car veers into your lane; it warns you with audiovisual signals, and once you apply the brakes, the car adds braking pressure because too many drivers don't brake hard enough. Pre-Safe Brake detects pedestrians and stopped cars and applies the brakes, hard. Up to 50 kph or 31 mph, there will be no collision, Mercedes says, and up to 72 kph or 45 mph the collision will at least be mitigated.
I sat in on a series of tests with a Mercedes driver at the wheel; a pedestrian dummy crossed in front and the car slammed to a safe stop. In another test, a car swerved a few feet into our lane and our car moved to the right, but still in the travel lane (photo right). With Pre-Safe Plus, if the car's rear-facing radar detects a likely rear-end collision, it snugs the seat belts tight and if the car is standing still locks the brakes; on Benzes sold outside the US, the hazard lamps flash at high frequency.
Active parking assist
The car detects an open parking space suitable for parallel or back-in (mall) parking. Once you put the car in reverse, it automatically backs you in to the space. It can't park head in, yet, but Mercedes notes back-in parking reduces backing out collisions when you're done shopping.
All-LED lighting, better night vision
Never again will you pulled over for a defective tail lamp. Every bulb in the car is an LED that should last several lifetimes of the car. In total, the S-Class has almost 500 LEDs: up to 56 LEDs for each of the headlamps, up to 35 LEDs for each taillamp, four for the rear fog lamp, and about 300 for interior ambient lighting with seven color choices including blue (photo). In world markets, individual elements swivel and turn and can be masked to not shine at an oncoming car or the car in front of you. In the US, the headlamp as a unit can still swivel to follow the steering wheel. Going to LEDs cuts power consumption as well.
The lighting system teams up with Night View Assist Plus, the most current MB night vision system, which combines active (illuminated) and passive (heat detecting) infrared sensors. A black and white image appears in the cockpit as you drive. If sensors detect a human or animal on or near the road, the center of the instrument cluster pops up the night view display even if it wasn't already on, and puts a red rectangle around any animal or human it sees. Then one of the headlamp units swivels, aims at the human, and strobes or flashes the headlamp three times so you see the pedestrian — and so the pedestrian recognizes the potential danger. It won't flash an animal because their reaction is hard to predict, Mercedes says. With this combination, night vision rises from "nice to have if you're checking every options box" to "seriously useful safety tool." The downside remains: You're paying $2,260 to protect somebody you probably don't know.
Streaming music from the car, not your phone
When a car has an on-board telematics module with a cellular modem, why not use that to stream audio, rather than tether your phone? That's how the S-Class will deliver online services including streaming audio. Everybody in the car gets a separate music or entertainment stream from a DVD player in the dash, a DVD changer above the center rear armrest, AM/FM/HD/satellite radio head unit, two USB jacks in the console with power to charge an iPad, leftover space on the 250GB navigation hard disk drive for ripped music files and Gracenote lookup, SD card slot, or streaming audio. The modem also provides WiFi that allows internet access for up to about 10 devices, other Mercedes in-dash apps, and 3D Google terrain maps to the navigation system.
Americans will be pleased to know we won't be hobbled by the entry-level audio system and its meager 10 speakers that are offered outside North America. Standard audio in the home of the Stand Your Ground and the Big Mac is a 13-speaker, 590-watt Burmester system. The upgrade, Burmester again, is 24 speakers, 1540 watts, and $6,400. The two tweeters in the front door extend out 10mm (0.4 inches) when the system comes on. Burmester is a bespoke Berlin audio company that outfits only Porsche and now Mercedes.
For watching, four LCD screens are available. In front are two 12.3-inch, 1440×540 TFT displays. The left screen is the instrument panel. In addition to the usual gauges, it can also display current-music information, a simplified navigation screen, or a target-seeking night vision image (more below). It flows into the center stack screen with only a narrow strip with a couple buttons separating them. The center display can be had with SplitView, its term for the Sharp LCD technology that angles separate full-screen images at the driver and passenger, the only cost being halved resolution: 720×540 for each viewing side, where pixels 1, 3, 5, etcetera face the driver and 2, 4, 6, etcetera face the passenger. That lets the front seat passenger watch a movie that the driver cannot see. The only obstacle is a couple of dumb state legislatures whose laws say a front seat display can't play video, as opposed to restricting a display to not being seen by the driver when the car moves. Dual rear seat displays measure 10.2 inches, 960×540.
Good not great 3G WiFi out in the hinterlands
In an early production car I drove with integrated cellular WiFi, we could maintain multiple internet connections but throughput was slow. Most likely it was where we tried: in Muskoka, Ontario, a lakes and resort district 125 miles north of Toronto with cell service although not a lot of it. But multiple WiFi connections in a car is not bleeding edge tech, so likely it will work most places. MB execs also hinted that the 3G telematics phone in the S-Class will yield to faster 4G in the future.
At the introduction, Mercedes-Benz did not announce pricing for Mbrace2 with streaming media. Pricing for Mbrace2 is currently tiered: $280 a year for the core safety tools plus, $240 for Mbrace Plus concierge service and traffic/weather, and $168 for Mercedes-Benz Apps that currently includes internet browsing, Google Local Search, Yelp, Facebook and News, but not streaming media, which could be a bandwidth hog if you stream a lot of music. Mbrace2 cars have an industry advantage: Updates are sent directly to the car. That would save Ford a lot of trouble every time they need to refresh Sync and MyFord Touch.
With apps embedded in the dash, Mercedes is stepping back from phone-based apps the car controls. The means you'd better like TuneIn because you can't control Aha, Pandora, MOG or Spotify from the car except by manipulating your phone directly. Over time, Mercedes probably needs to offer the services its buyers already use. The choice of TuneIn was partly because Mercedes wanted to offer a single app that was available in the most countries.
The feature called Magic Body Control — maybe "Spanx" was taken?
The features and options lists include some intriguing offerings. Most notable is Magic Body Control and, no, that is not what you wear under a slim-fitting outfit when you haven't been to the gym lately. Rather, MBC uses the stereo cameras to scan the road ahead for undulations and adjust each wheel's suspension to smooth the ride. A couple times we drove over a bump that was noticeable in the passenger compartment. Mercedes explained that it's for a series of similar bumps and not, say, a single frost heave or speed bump.
Hot stone massage, climate control with active perfuming
This car has more seating variants than other cars have paint choices. Every seat can be heated and cooled; there is heating and then there's rapid heating; the cooling function sucks then blows. (Sorry.) For the first four minutes the seat-bottom fans draw air in to wick away moisture, then they reverse direction and blow air on your back side.
The Executive Seat package allows the right rear seat to recline 43.5 degrees instead of a mere 37 degrees for the package with reclining rear seats. With the executive package, the right front seat slides forward an extra three inches, a footrest pops up, and you're in business class. The front console continues all the way back, cupholders employ the Peltier effect to cool or warm beverages, and airline-style tray tables pop up from the extended console. Mercedes says it's a one-hand job; I saw an MB exec (not in the trays and seats department) who struggled mightily for almost a minute to get it back into place.
The massage functions include a quote hot stone massage. Air bladders inflate to emulate a touch point and that area heats up rapidly. It's quite convincing except once the bladder deflates, the heat doesn't immediately dissipate. Still, a 45-minute segment in the executive seat with my feet up, someone else driving, me tinkering with the entertainment sources, and the massager at work, was as comfortable as I've ever spent lounging in a car.
Perfumed air for $350 sounds like overkill unless you live in a polluted city or on a dairy farm. The air balance package filters and ionizes the air and injects a scented undertone – sports, nightlife, fireside or downtown mood – into the car that is quite subtle and doesn't appear to linger on your clothes. On a $100K car, this is petty cash.
Hands-on with the S-Class
When I drove the S-Class, the first thing I noticed was the quiet — quiet beyond any car I've ever driven before. The last time I heard less noise, or so it seemed, was in the Bose anechoic chamber. The second thing was the size of those side-by-side front displays: wondrously large and readable, and a huge improvement over the 7-inch center stack display in the flagship SUV, the Mercedes-Benz GL. The third thing was my delight at being able to lightly ungrip the steering wheel and watch the car track straight and true for 10-15 seconds at a time, longer if I gripped and ungripped the wheel every few seconds.
It's a big car at 201 inches long, 75 inches wide – same as the Cadillac Escalade give or take a couple of inches — but the circle of sensors makes the car feel smaller because it helps you stay in lane. There was plenty of power. The Comand cockpit control wheel was fairly easy to use: Press one of the Navi-Radio-Media-Tel buttons in front of the controller, then fine tune your selections with the Comand wheel. The Comand leather wrist rest slides away to expose a telephone keypad for dialing. You can also use voice commands as well. It takes a bit longer to master a cockpit control wheel than a touchscreen but after that the control wheel will be faster for most drivers.
The biggest challenge while driving was the complexity of the infotainment and car control options. My co-driver and I found the air balance (fragrance) menu early on, and later spent several frustrating minutes trying to find where it was hiding the second time around. The adaptive cruise control stalk is hidden behind the steering below the turn signal and I managed to push a button that would not let the car go faster even when I stepped on the gas; call it unintended non-acceleration. (Tapping the brakes or pushing the ACC stalk to Off returned control until I stopped and read up on how to use ACC.) Similarly, the remote control that switches between left and right rear seat adjustments, or left and right infotainment menus, took some getting used to, as did the smartphone app for seats and infotainment. I'd call it a 50-50 problem: part is the fault of the all those features, part is the fault of early iterations of interface design. I suspect there'll be more revisions as MB gets feedback. I would wager that Mercedes will get dinged when Consumer Reports does its review, based on how Ford Sync and Cadillac CUE cars have fared with their newer, complex interfaces.
Should you buy?
There is no bad car among the full-size premium luxury sedans. The segment focuses on the S-Class, Audi A8, and BMW 7 Series, extends to cars in the general price bracket with less space (Maserati Quattroporte, Porsche Panamera) and down in price and possibly prestige (Acura RLX, Hyundai Equus, Jaguar XJ, Lexus LS). The buying choice might hinge on styling or exclusivity. If you can afford a $1,000 monthly lease payment, maybe $2,000 is possible and an entry Bentley or Rolls-Royce is do-able, especially pre-owned. Cadillac said it will not build a $100,000 halo car but Volkswagen just announced it's taking another stab at the US market with its premium VW Phaeton. (Phaeton 1.0 departed the US seven years ago when buyers realized you could get its sibling, the Audi A8, for the same money.)
The 2014 S-Class arrives first in September as the rear-drive, V8 Mercedes-Benz S550, followed in November with the 4Matic, all-wheel-drive, S550. Best guess is $95,000-$99,000 for the S550, another $3,000 for the all-wheel-drive model. That's $5,000-$15,000 more than BMW and Audi competitors, although a higher price in this category isn't always a terrible thing. Expect Mercedes to bring to the US within 1-2 years a six-cylinder diesel that gets real world highway economy beyond 35 mpg and a six-cylinder hybrid, both for about $1,000 less. With the diesel, the attraction in a high-end car is not so much saving a few bucks on fuel, but the ability to drive 700-800 miles between fill-ups. There will also be AMG models for more performance and exclusivity in the $140,000 range.
To get the real technical wizardry behind the S-Class, add $17,000. Start with the Premium 1 package at $4,500 that will be on most cars (and a required building block for other options): parking sensors, heated and ventilated front seats with massage, and keyless go. Add the surround view camera, $800. The driver assistance package, $4,500, takes the car from safe to ultra-safe with Distronic Plus (stop and go adaptive cruise control), blind spot detection, active lane keeping assist (self-steering), front and rear collision mitigation system. Night view assist plus is $2,260. The split view center front display runs $710. Magic body control is $4,450. Other Mercedes-Benzes have some of these features, including the midsize E-Class, but not all of them.
For ultimate comfort, there's the air balance package, $350, with perfume, filtration, and ionization. Warmth comfort, $2,350, warms and cools the rear seats, heats the front and rear armrests, heats the steering wheel. The premium Burmester 3D sound system is $6,400. Rear seat entertainment runs $2,650.
For the executive seating in back, you need the rear seat package, $3,000, with active seat belt buckles and airbags in the belt webbing and an electric footrest on the right rear side. The executive seat package that reclines 43.5 degrees adds $3,500. Folding tables in back and two- not three-person seating adds $1,950.
With Designo (de-zeen-yo) premium leather seating, a sport package, and a refrigerator box in back, and all the other options, the sticker price will be in the neighborhood of $150,000. One reason for the fully optioned S-Class is to fill the niche left by the $400,000 Maybach, a sibling brand that sold about 3,000 vehicles in the past 15 years.
As to whether you should consider the new S-Class: If you want the most technology, safety, entertainment and passenger comfort in one car, the S-Class is the clear way to go. At the same time, the sixth generation W222 of 2014 looks not unlike the fifth generation W221 S-Class of 2005-2013. If you do buy, commit yourself to mastering the features and technologies of the navigation, infotainment and seating systems. If you don't, you'll whine about the car being too hard to use. As with MyFord Touch and Cadillac CUE, the richness and complexity of technology means the driver must prove himself worthy of the car's many features. That's not the way it should be, but that's the way it is with the very best car ever made — so far.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
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