Gadgetory

I'll admit it it's all new s-class is quite a thing to behold I mean these are always flagships but this new one it's like it found the table full of technology at the Mercedes building and gorged on all of it did they get it right or did they just get it big let's drive this 2014 s550 and check the tech now first off this new S is bad news for atheists it's proof there is a God because they got rid of those crappy looking faux pontoon fenders that made the last car look like a Mazda 3 now spotting a new s-class is easiest from the front big deep aggressive grille looks really hot to be honest and now you've got an LED eyebrow above the headlight as opposed to below on the outgoing car so easy to pick one out of a crowd speaking of those LEDs Mercedes says this is the first car in production that has no filament light bulbs at all 56 led's make up the headlights 35 make up the tail lights and 300 are in the cabin now this may be the first car we've driven that totally askew is anything but LCD displays everything is communicated via these two twelve point three inch 8-3 ratio LCD panels now right off the bat look at that map that is amazing this is proof of a maximum technology that sometimes things get faster enough or bigger enough that they actually hit a limit and they change every Road is there every nuance of it and you really get a sense of where you are and what roads coming up next no other system really pulls that together like this the bigger issue is the tech stuff that is in here there's a lot of it is scattered all over the place particularly when you get to media radio has your radio stations and you have to go through this almost sort of needless screen change to get to them it's pretty but it takes time of my eyes off the road then for your non radio sources you go to media now a lot of car companies segregate other sources under media but I think for an all-new design like this s-class they should think more progressively and start putting all media together in one place but then when you want to get to your internet media sources you go to yet third menu which of course is your phone and address book but also the internet stuff which lives under here and under that sub menu you find mercedes-benz apps but there's also internet radio under there and then there's a www thing which is a browser but doesn't work when you're driving a lot of familiar things here Google local search Pio I downloads weather traffic cameras is new in this car you can get a look at where traffic cameras are and look at them for the road ahead tuning radio I don't recall that being in a bands interface before Yelp we've seen before and of course gas stations and movies a lot of what's on this interface has to do with the seats you can adjust the size of the backrest you can adjust and position the lumbar same thing with the shoulder region massage has been in there for a long time but now instead of just having levels of intensity they've gone into like types of massage you have a seat heating balance control and thank goodness you can reset the whole thing when you get lost one of the things I've always hated in Mercedes is this little vestigial weird number keypad who has this anymore they finally made it useful by turning it into a touch pad the problem is it's very vague the touch isn't well calibrated as you can see I can easily touch two stations or even more at a time and of course whatever you're listening to comes to a high-end audio system in this car including a couple of choices of burma ster audio systems which suffer primarily from the unfortunate coincidence that they look at a glance just like a Budweiser logo i had three passengers getting here and say when did Bud get into car audio and they weren't kidding it of course sounds great I won't say it's less filling but it definitely is one of those where I have to wonder how much money can you put into a car audio system before you no longer hear it but basically see it I would check this out up here in the glovebox is a little bottle of stink water this thing is a perfume that will get injected into the air conditioning and ventilation system on demand there's a menu for this as well the intensity of it the key to it Mercedes says differently those little four dollar would you get in the car wash is this will not stain your interior so once you turn it off it dissipates and goes away they named all the sense as moods including one called free side mood that disturbingly sounds like there will be a I conceived in the backseat at some point in the back of our s550 it's relatively Spartan believe it or not because we haven't got all the options which could include these executive top-up tables like you have in business class screens that let you echo the navigation screen like on an airplane and of course all manner of additional massage and heating and cooling but even though we're kind of slumming it back here there doesn't care got plenty of room for him dual panoramic sunroof back here but I got to point this out it's actually broken up and smaller than the one we just had on a jet a wagon so it's not bad but not the best back around these seats and also all around the cabin you've got this funky Club mood lighting back here this kind of goes with the whole perfume in the glovebox theme five colours you can select from different levels of intensity different levels of absurdity one day I want to be a Mercedes mechanical only because they have the most spacious offices underneath these hoods that open perpendicular I love that here we find a relatively normal Mercedes story a twin-turbo v8 one turbo on each bank 4.7 liter displacement direct injection sophisticated variable valve timing the output is 455 horsepower 516 foot-pounds of torque great torque figure it's a v8 and because it's got turbos on it zero to 60 for this 4,300 pounds sedan comes up in a very quick 4.8 seconds one choice on the gearbox 7-speed automatic a real automatic not a dual clutch anything like that the mpg numbers on this guy are still TBD as of our shoot today but we're guessing eighteen thirty which will be roughly twenty percent better on both counts to the outgoing s-class with a similar engine that's what we're saying these promises anyway now self-parking is something new in cars these days but self-parking something this big in a space we've set up this tight this should be fun alright the little blue icon tells me it's looking for parking I'm looking for a white diamond alongside it that says it's found a space big enough to put this thing in there it is put it in reverse okay self parking and here we go this is where you really appreciate active parking not with a small car with a big car that you're pretty sure you couldn't park yourself at least not two times in a row when we are really close to that bumper ok time to cut in let's see how it does let's close that looks close coming back I don't hear any curb rash feel like I'm about to select Drive look at that hard right nibbling nibbling going to the front here select reverse and let's mop up and finish very nice okay brick I'm gonna do is come to a stop why start with a stop because I want to see how this auto start-stop technology has been refined engine shuts down I did not detect that if I wasn't watching the tach I wouldn't have known it and the restart almost is imperceptible quick and barely shaking the car finally someone's getting starts top done in a way that befits a car of this refinement now these cars can be equipped so they will actually self drive up to the mid 30 mile-per-hour range like in traffic they'll follow the car in front they'll handle acceleration braking and steering I'll be honest I never really got it to work in my driving with the car ditto goes for the lane departure tech that was on and off as well but my colleague Wayne Cunningham says it worked out pretty well for him combine that with the fact this is a pre-production car and I'm going to withhold judgment on both those technologies till later this car does two things really well first of all it showcases an awful lot of Technology most of which is not silly gimmickry it's a good state of the art showcase secondly it also takes the s-class brand and I think makes it much more progressive this doesn't feel like such an old goats car anymore from the interior design of the exterior design to the fact that it has a lot of really interesting technology that's pretty much all well done Oh