Gadgetory

and give you the short story on the Maybach s600 in 10 seconds it's an 8 inch longer fully loaded s-class 600 and the 8 inches longer gives you a whole bunch more room in the back that's where the focus is on the extra length notably it doesn't pick up a whole lot of extra weight it only weighs about 230 pounds more than the short s-class otherwise the sheet metal on an s-class versus a Maybach is so similar you should look for the badges the one here on the sale panel and the one on the rump you won't find those on any other Mercedes now getting into a Maybach s600 is not shockingly different than an s-class room first thing your eyes were drawn to are the dual 12-point three inch widescreen LCD I don't think I've got that much LCD real estate in my TV room the one on the left of course are your virtual gauges which occasionally move out of the way to allow night vision to take over the centre this big screen we've seen before it's the command system that has navigation that is well rendered but doesn't strike any new ground beyond all the in-car broadcast satellite and external media sources you've also got the ability to have tuned in as a streaming radio choice and an in-car hotspot but that's part of a telematics subscription at 450 a year now all of this is driven by two controllers no touch German remember I must say you might think this trackpad is gilding the lily with a control knob right near it but this does wonders that touchpad is also good for handwriting and pinch and zoom on the map it's right about now diving into all the menus you can access with these controls that you realize there's too damn much going on in this car if you are working hard enough to afford this you don't have time to be playing with your car's menus you're making money chief example go to the HVAC ribbon of buttons here and just press the one that says menu then spend the next afternoon or so figuring out all the ways you can set up the climate in this car from the temperature to the air distribution to the air flow you can blow hard softer moderate 2-foot well airflow climate mode the air freshener which is separate from the ionizer really and similar layers and layers and layers of possibility occur on almost every system in the infotainment head unit you don't need a loan to buy this or you need a degree in engineering and you know you're not an Alexis in this car completely different design language of course but the seats are hard Alexis always has plush seats this one does not now let's talk about some visual tech going on in this car I told you about the night vision that we had in between the main gauges we've also got the best 360 bird's-eye view camera in the business look how beautifully it stitches the four cameras together it doesn't even appear to be four angles that's pretty slick and we've got the magic sky control sunroof front and rear hit this little button right by the sunroof control and it goes from dark blue to nearly clear electronically they apply high voltage to a crystalline structure inside the glass panel to have it either reflect or pass light I bet your Hyundai doesn't have that and my last visual trick to show you is this one you find that little icon looks like a book and now you've enabled split view on the passenger side right now I'm seeing media from the driver's side right now you might be seeing the navigation same screen same time but at this 45-degree angle it feeds two different displays that's pretty hot the audio in this car is off the charts and that's bass fifteen hundred and forty watts twenty four speakers from Burma stir it was even a ceiling speaker in the rear and a separate sub in the trunk that gets its own 400 watt feed the tweeters even rotate I'm not sure why and this is low tech but really cool the hinge on the console changes depending on where you open it I couldn't get enough of this I played with it all day now driving the my box not much different than any other s-class you've got this sort of old-school electronic column shifter here paddles on the wheel by the way over here in the center console you've got a sport or economy mode for the powertrain and below that is a BC not a spelling lesson that's automatic body control that's the active suspension either sport or comfort the adaptive suspension on this car is not just mechanically based it uses a camera to look at the road and to know when there's a big bump or divot coming and pre adjust the suspension not wait for the impact to happen this drives me nuts though about the rear compartment and the front for that matter you don't have infinite door checks you got old-school three position notched hinges this thing is gonna cut your shin off and did it to me several times that since you have to work 18 hours a day to afford one of these they give you some nice tables to do your work upon and what's interesting about these compared to some other cars of this luxury category is that these are pretty darn good this is like what you get in the airplane aluminized and they come to the right place dual tablet-like screen these are not iPads these are Mercedes proprietary screens that can be playing either plugged in media DVD or get you access to almost anything at the front or let you bring up media that gets sent to the front for Master System distribution let me tell you is it better than my office cupholders are so passe instead you want a heated and cooled cup holder just press the button for which you want the little lightning side changes accordingly as well people are nuts and of course in the car like this you got to offer the coup de Gras of luxury silliness the bottle cooler the fridge right here behind your elbow holds a couple of what it looks like to be full-size bottles of champagne though I'm sure they don't officially endorse that problem is look how much room in the trunk it takes up there's barely enough room for the owners ego in there anymore the Maybach s 600 shares an engine with a standard s 600 luckily it's a lot of engine a six-litre twin-turbo v12 doing 523 horsepower and 612 pound-feet of torque rear wheel drive only through a 7-speed automatic zero to sixty and five seconds is only a half a second slower than a short s-class and the weight at 50 to 69 is only 28 more pounds per inch of added length 13 20 mpg escapes single digits but not by enough to escape a gas guzzler tax first thing I noticed in terms of its driving behavior though is if you have it in this economy mode and if you have auto start/stop enabled this may be the most raggedly driving experience on the road part of that is to make it a more comfortable less transitional ride between stop and go when you put it in sport mode though and trounce it grief how can something this big go that fast is what you think we do have a head-up display on this car which is nothing necessarily new for Mercedes but I will say they need to go take some lessons from BMW that's not real satisfying the overall smoothness is incredible as you'd expect partly because we've got over 5,000 pounds to dampen out row and undulation in all the power that is available varied as it may be the heaviness the adaptive ride control and of course who knows how many hundreds or thousands of sound deadening and insulation add up to a sublime driving experience okay base if you can call it that a Maybach s 600 is about a hundred and ninety-three thousand dollar proposition but of course we got to go CNET style we're gonna add a few grand to that in the following fashion those rear tables and heated and cooled cup holder got to have those for two grand the fridge is 1,100 skip that all day long and get some trunk space split view I love it 700 bucks magic sky control is a pricey overhead toy 5000 but boy is that slick and of course the gas guzzler tax that's 1,700 bucks you could have spent in a lot better ways all in about two hundred and three grand the way we would do it now if you're going to buy a car like this you sure don't need my opinion whether you need it or not it's not a need product but it's a whole lot less ostentatious and over-the-top than the old maybach 57 s and 62 s it utterly separates driving from the chore driving or cars driven C next style standing by now at C net on cars.com click on the road