Gadgetory

Marcedes invited dan and i on a 500 kilometer road trip through France and Spain in one of their brand-new 2018 Mercedes G classes the Mercedes vehicles are pretty impressive especially if you're into the luxury off-roading market the G class is exceptional the thing I'm most excited about is the three locking differentials not just one or two but three lucky for us Mercedes is letting us take these off-road in some pretty extreme conditions so we'll see how they hold up literally on a cliff right now let's get started obviously we've already done some pretty heavy driving in this but I'm gonna run you through the exterior so this is pretty much the same design as the previous Mercedes G classes except for they've managed to shave a hundred and seventy kilograms off of the total weight which is pretty sweet it still has the same iconic markers on the side which side note is actually pretty cool if if this ever hits a pedestrian this whole thing will collapse inside the frame not damaging the light and more importantly not damaging the pedestrian same iconic grille with the Mercedes logo and the same relative boxy shape that the normal G classes have always had for the last 30 years one thing Mercedes has bragged about is the same style of door handles they've always had with the push button on the side and the spare tire on the rear and it comes in two different styles this is the G 500 and there's also a G 63 and I'll talk about those more in a bit so inside of the back you can tell we've been driving for a minute we have the same opening style handles we have back right here and inside the car these seats actually fold completely flat so we can lift these up set these down and there's a lot of room for activities back here the thing I'm most excited about though is the triple locking differentials not only one in the rear but there's also one in the front and one in the middle and I'll explain what I mean so every car has something called a differential that's in between the two tires that lets them spin independently of each other my truck my Toyota Tacoma has a rear Locker which means that it can lock the differential and make the tire spin together at the same time which helps you get out of sticky situations let's say you're in a patch of mud and one tire is spinning the other tire won't move while that tire spinning so with the locker it makes it so that both tires have to move at the same time which means that if this one's spinning it transfers the power to the one that's not spinning and also makes it move so in this G class undercarriage right here we have the front of the car and here we have the rear differential with the locker which is pretty standard on off-road cars but we also have a center locking differential here which means that the front and rear tires won't spin independently of each other they will all have to spin at the same speed at the same time and then this G class also has a front differential with a locker basically with all of those lockers you'll just never get stuck in g-class but rather than just talk about the locking differentials how about we show you how they work so inside the g-class we have a plethora of buttons these control the seats over here we have two big monitors which I'll talk about in a second right now we're going to talk about these dynamic select programs here we have obviously your basic slippery individual comfort Sport and Sport Plus modes but if we jump down here into the differentials and we put on the center lock then it brings us the different kind of trail modes so we have the regular trail mode and then we also have a rock mode and then we have the sand mode here and each one of those the tires act differently depending on what mode is set to and also if you check right here as I'm moving this steering wheel you can see the angle of the front tire as I turn the steering wheel back and forth so most of the cars that have driven have the exhaust coming out the back and it sounds you know like a normal car normal truck but here in this Mercedes g-class the exhaust sounds completely different and first of all comes out the side right next to the back passenger rear tire and secondly it sounds more like a harley-davidson motorcycle than anything else so now we have the g-class 500 we're gonna take it off roading up at these mountains behind me this one it doesn't have the side rails and it doesn't have those tailpipes that stick out the side so the sound of this 500 is quite a bit different than the 63 that we are in before but this one is better for off-roading because it has that additional ground clearance it's time to see how it handles for real though so even though we're going uphill right now and I can't see the road directly underneath me we have the camera here which can see the road directly underneath me and I can see over the crest of the hill which to my eye is looking over the bonnet we're looking over the hood I can't see over the hill so it's nice to have these additional cameras it's the one thing that I've noticed taking this G class off road remember this is the 500 is that it is super super quiet when I'm driving the only thing you can hear is the sound of the engine as it's revving there's no wind noise there's no nothing else and that's because the cab of the vehicles air tight like it's water tight you can feel it when the doors are slammed you can feel the pressure of the car so right now we're going over this muddy terrain area in front of us and there's a huge puddle up ahead and it's kind of crazy because the water level as we get deeper the water levels going to come up to the doors and the doors should stay watertight so we're going to go through the water how deep you can see how deep it is coming up to the doors and there's zero water getting inside of the cab it's insane so a is watertight and B all of that water tightness helps keep the noise level down as well solid day a bunch of water cover in the hood yeah the water level was definitely above that bottom seam at the door you can see the dry patches right here in the wetness right down here so above this bottom hinge the whole bottom foot of the door was underwater but still nothing got in the car that's impressive so we've done a lot of the off-road driving we've tested the off-road capabilities but to be honest with you with how expensive this is it's more of like a luxury vehicle and so I imagine most of the time it's going to be on road because you don't want to scratch something that cost this much so as far as the on-road driving goes it feels like a luxury vehicle still and one of the things that comes with luxury vehicles is performance and speed and even driving I have freeway speeds it still has a lot of acceleration left over to get even farther past legal speed limits but with that Mercedes has put a lot of effort into making the vehicle more quiet the G class is not an aerodynamic vehicle by any means it is a box and has the aerodynamics of a box and while that's great for keeping the same style from the last 30 years of the G class it's not so great for wind noise but since this thing is pressurized and waterproof it does keep a lot of that exterior noise out including the road noise and cars next year so as far as the interior goes on the G Class this is another 500 with a white leather interior and it looks phenomenal check this out so right inside the door here we have the speakers we have all the seat controls like every single aspect of the seat can be controlled up down left and right back and forward and this seat also this is the leather Dan and his son Lincoln chopped up one of the s-class seats and this has the same technology inside of it so it has like the massaging air pockets and these sides as you turn the steering wheel back and forth the sides grip your body with each turn of the vehicle it's pretty sweet plus it has heating and cooling in the seats with these buttons right here normal window buttons and just the white leather everywhere inside the vehicle we have a display right here as well as a second display over here on the side that's the same kind of thing we saw in the a-class when me and Dan went to Amsterdam for the a-class reveal one thing that I'm not super fond of and I've noticed in every single G class that I've been in I think this is number six or seven in this road trip is that with the 2008 teens the reflection of this vent right here is in the rearview mirror you can see that little circle of the vent in the mirror all the time and it's not super distracting and you might not always notice it but I have there are buttons everywhere on this I feel like some of them are a little bit redundant and like down here we have a back button right here we have a back button right here we have a back button there's just so many different places to control the electronics inside of the car that wherever your hand is at that time you can control basically everything whether it's down here at the bottom or up here on the steering wheel couple more buttons up here at the top and a sunroof which I love there is five billion specks we could talk about safety is one of them to want to talk about that so with the seatbelts when you clip them in there's a little motor of tapas inch isn't tied across your chest I thought that was cool my truck doesn't have that and then there's also the normal safety features that cars in 2018 have so it has the lane assist it helps you stay between the two lines and the thing is is that it's actually pretty strong if the car thinks that I'm just naturally drifting into another lane it'll take the steering wheel and jerk it back into the lane whether it's you know a center stripe it'll do it like insurance segments or if it's a solid stripe like on the edge of the road it'll do it hard it almost makes you think that you hit something on the side of the road because it jerks you back into the center so I haven't quite decided if I like that feature yet but it's still interesting that it's there also when you're changing lanes and signaling to go in one lane or the other there's little LED markers on the sideview mirrors that tell you if there's a card or blind spot which is super super helpful there's at least 50 buttons within my grasp right here and a lot of them do the same thing like the back button that I pointed out before there's three of those all within reach of my right hand but for those of you already familiar with Mercedes vehicles these buttons are pretty standard and it is good to always have easy access to the buttons you press the most also didn't realize the mercedes-benz logo lights up that's pretty sweet we finally made it to Barcelona after over five hundred kilometres of driving from France to Spain to be honest with you before this video I knew that the g-class was a little on the more luxury side of things but I didn't know it was as capable off-road as it actually is and super huge thanks to mercedes for letting me and dan put that to the test literally today and yesterday the fancy seats and the three lockers are still my favorite things of the g-class let me know what you think is best down in the comments and thanks a ton for watching I'll see you around