Mercedes-Benz S500 review: too smart for its own good

The Mercedes-Benz S-class has become a byword for innovation. But this is a step too far.

Lost the plot: the Mercedes-Benz S500

Almost all of the world’s important automotive leaps forward in the past 50 years made their debut in the S-class Mercedes-Benz. Renault gave us volume knobs on the steering column. Chrysler gave us a van with seats in it. Austin gave us the square steering wheel. And Lancia gave us the V4 engine. Whereas the S-class was used as a launchpad for antilock brakes that actually worked, stability control, intelligent cruise control, double glazing, a voice-activated phone system and cylinder deactivation. It has always been a looking glass through which we see the future.

So I was keen to get behind the wheel of the new version. Would there be an air-conditioning system that reduces the ageing process of the driver? Or a med lab, perhaps, in which simple fractures could be repaired as you drive home? No. Instead, what you get is a load of flimflam. It’s like the designer went to Poundland, bought everything and fitted the lot.

Let’s take the head-up display (HUD) as a case in point. We see these in many cars nowadays, so to make the Mercedes different they’ve decided to show everything that it’s technically possible to show. Speed, direction of travel, a sat-nav map, where the enemy tanks are located and, most distracting of all, a speed limit indicator that flashes red. It’s like you’re driving through a blizzard of incoming laser fire.

Of course you can tailor all this stuff to suit your requirements or you can turn it off, but before setting off you also have to turn off the stop-start facility and the lane departure system that tugs at the wheel if you go near the white line. Once on the move, you will have the devil’s own job finding the correct buttons. At one point I confidently yanked at the knob to shut down the HUD only to discover that it was the handbrake. This surprised the man who was in the car behind.

Then there’s the gearlever. As has been normal in large Mercs for years, it’s mounted on the steering column. But to keep the aesthetes happy it is identical to the stalk on the other side of the steering column, the one that does the indicators. Which means that every time I tried to turn left I engaged neutral. Often this surprised the drivers of cars in my wake as well.

After only a very short period of time I’d developed a frothing hatred for this new car, and at this point I hadn’t even delved into the control system, which is displayed on a screen the size of a council house television in the middle of the dash.

This is a car that can not only park itself but find parking spaces that are empty. It can steer itself in cities and on the motorway; it can “read” the road ahead and set itself up to cope; it can shine a bright light into the faces of pedestrians who may be about to step into its path; and it can hide its door handles. And all of this – and a hell of a lot more besides – can be controlled and tuned to suit your needs, which means menus and sub-menus and electronic bowels so complex that to operate it all your chauffeur will have to be brighter than the love child of Montgomery Scott and Bill Gates.

I’m afraid it gets worse, because this car doesn’t feel right somehow. In a bid to stay on the right side of environmental legislation the engineers have plainly been through the S-class with a razor blade, shaving the odd gram here and there. Even though it’s longer than the previous model, it now weighs barely more than two tonnes, and from behind the wheel you can sense this lack of weight. It doesn’t feel flimsy, but nor does it feel like an S-class should: solid.

I’d love to tell you in detail what it’s like to drive but I wasn’t really concentrating – mostly because I was captivated by the dashboard, which was showing me a 3D ball that rolled towards me and went green when I took my foot off the accelerator and went away and became red when I put my foot down. I have absolutely no idea why. I tried, at one point, asking the on-board computer, using my voice, but it didn’t understand a word I said.

Of course, if you owned this car you’d get used to all this stuff, in the same way that you’d get used to a Google phone. But I don’t want to spend my life getting used to stuff. And I certainly wouldn’t want to sell the car after five years, not having discovered half of its talents.

MERCEDES-BENZ S500

Engine: 3.0-litre turbo petrol (320kW/520Nm)

Transmission: Nine-speed automatic, AWD

Price: Not available in Australia; the S450 (from $240,700) has the same engine

Stars out of 5  ★★★