Review: Mercedes-Benz S 580 L
According to my wife I am ‘needy’. Strangely, however, I do not generally enjoy cars that insist on hugging me, like this Mercedes limousine.
According to my wife, and countless dozens of other lucky women before her, I am “needy”. This is an unkind word some people use when you suggest that you enjoy physical affection and that, just sometimes, you’d like them to let you spoon them, all night, even though it’s summer and this may cause you to stick together like two overly iced doughnuts.
(I am tempted to take a tangent here and discuss one very strange couple I know where the man, who is more diminutive than his partner, refers to himself as “little spoon” in their relationship, but I won’t, because it makes me picture a monkey sleeping with a giraffe.)
Strangely, however, I do not generally enjoy cars that insist on hugging me, like this Mercedes-Benz S 580 L, with its Active Multicontour Seat Package.
Yes, these seats are luxuriant and louche, and I love nearly all of their eight different massage programs, particularly the hot-stone ones (the Activating massages, which send buzzes through your buttocks, feel a little too much like sitting on an alarm clock), but it’s the Dynamic Bolsters I can’t abide.
The S class, particularly in this 580 L version, which is as long as an Oliver Stone director’s cut, is not a sports car, so the driver’s seat couldn’t be designed to grip your hips and support your shoulders the way it would be in a Mercedes-AMG variant. Instead, it is spacious, with a back rest wide enough for a Captain of Industry and all of his Toad of Toad Hall love handles.
The S 580 L, however, is powered by a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 (sensible types can choose a six-cylinder instead), which means that it can be driven sportily, should the mood overtake sir. Normally an engine with 370kW and 700Nm would make such an option seem irresistible, but the S Class is so quiet, smooth and unbothered by such otiose displays of male ego that for the first few days it didn’t occur to me to put my foot down at all.
I fear I was somewhat overcome by the effortless quiet of its propulsion (if you’d told me it was powered by cooing doves I’d have believed you), and the glorious noise of its 15-speaker, 710-watt Burmester 3D sound system.
The flawless air suspension system also made me feel removed from the unpleasant business of driving like a yob, which can often feel compulsory when near a V8 engine. The fact that you can barely hear this one, ever, does help to remove such temptation.
Make any attempt to hustle the S 580 L through a corner, however, and the seats become concerned about your considerable bulk sliding off their spacious surfaces and into the doors. To prevent this, the Dynamic Bolsters leap into action, giving you what can only be described as a one-armed hug. Turn sharply to the left and that side of the seat shoves you back into place.
I’ve felt this kind of nonsense before, mainly in seriously sporty cars where the seats are already pretty grippy and the idea is to allow you to feel like you’re in a race car with a harness, or at least to provide the impression that your cornering is creating F1-like g-forces.
But in an S Class, a vehicle that’s well over 5m long and nearly 2m wide, it just seems odd. A little clingy, even.
My wife, unsurprisingly, hated the seats, declaring they made her feel claustrophobic. The fact that her tiny little legs couldn’t stretch her feet to the floor also made her look self-consciously silly.
Happily, when she switched to the rear seats, which are almost overwhelming in their levels of plush comfort and include fluffy pillows rather than just head rests, she was very comfortable indeed, possibly because she was sitting so much further away from me.
Another incredible unnecessary and doubtless hugely expensive feature is the S Class’s 3D Driver’s Display, which works without the need for special glasses, happily, but merely distracted my eyes from the road more than was wise, as I sat there pondering how on Earth it was working, and even more so why I needed it to.
The S 580 L is a limousine, obviously, and as such I was left feeling a little unhappy that my beloved refuses to drive cars with very large price tags (this one carries a basic price of $335,100 which ballooned to $351,850 with a few options) because I would very much have preferred to be a passenger, at least some of the time.
Certainly, everyone I took for a ride looked both impressed and relaxed, indeed one friend was concerned that the driver shouldn’t be allowed to use the hot-stone massage, as she feared it would surely put them to sleep.
Which made me think that I should ask Mercedes to design some kind of vast, S-Class bed for me, one that would hold me tight at night. I know for sure already that my wife is more than happy to move to a different bedroom, so perhaps it would be a marriage saver.
Mercedes-Benz S 580 L
Engine: 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 (370kW/700Nm)
Fuel Economy: 8.4 litres per 100km
Transmission: 9-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Price: $335,100
Rating: 3.75 out of 5