Category: Large Executive 
Price Range: £57,490 to £148,290
Remarkable refinement, especially lack of road noise. Agile for its size, rapid, fun to drive, laden with understandable and useful technology.
Looks brash and may date quickly.
With beauty on its side it would be a five-star car.
You name it, it's probably here. Brake Assist Plus we've mentioned, using its combination of low- and high-frequency radar beams to help locate precisely the proximity of a car in front and add just the right amount of braking effort to your own. It's not standard, however, but optional in conjunction with Distronic Plus. There's also Pre-safe, which tensions seat belts, optimises seat positions, shuts windows and sunroof and inflates seat bolsters to get you in the best position for the accident the S-class's systems detect you're about to have. If, by deployment of supernatural skills, you manage to gather it all together and not crash, then all returns to its former state. The airbags alter their deployment force according to the weight and size of the appropriate seat occupant, too. That the S-class has ample airbags and ESP is taken as read, but surprisingly the Neckpro head restraints, which move forward in a rear impact to reduce whiplash, are options. That's because Mercedes engineers don't believe they're really needed, given all the other safety systems on board. The headlights are (optionally) steerable and fitted with extra cornering lights, and another option is the 'night view assist' system which uses infra-red beams to illuminate the road ahead where dipped headlights fail to reach. The view they reveal is displayed on a monochrome screen within the speedometer. Mercedes-Benz's studies reveal drivers of the new S-class to have a heart-rate typically six beats per minute below those of drivers in rival cars, incidentally.
