First Drive: The 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS450+ Is A Beautiful Electric Porpoise

Posted on December 23, 2021 by admin

I Don’t Know What To Do With All This Tech

My husband used to be a sales associate at a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Montreal, and he’s spent the entire duration of our marriage telling me that no automaker is as luxuriously high-tech as Mercedes. I have never discounted this observation. I’ve just also never felt the need to drive an extremely tech-heavy car. I still have a hard time dealing with a tiny infotainment screen.

So I think it’s probably a little bit of an understatement to say that the EQS’s offerings are a bit overwhelming. After I laughed out loud at the exterior, I also laughed out loud at the absolutely massive Hyperscreen. I wanted to ask it if it was compensating for something. I wanted to ask why such a cute fella needs such a big screen.

Functionally, the Hyperscreen is great. A single piece of curved glass, it’s a gorgeous feat of technological innovation that works with rapid speed due to an eight-core processor and 24 gigabytes of RAM. You tap on anything, and there’s not going to be lag. You’re immediately transported to the place you chose to go in the infotainment system.

The graphics are also gorgeous, but again, it’s a little bit Much. There’s a screen for the driver, one of the passenger, and a tall screen in the center, and in those latter two, you can access everything from radio controls to vehicle settings to satellite maps to photo galleries to video games. I did poke around the Tetris game and found it took a while to load but was otherwise fun. I still can’t imagine myself using an infotainment screen instead of my phone for gaming, though.

Even worse, you still get a lot of glare, despite the fact that Mercedes tried its best to avoid that. There’s not really anything you’re going to be able to do about the reflection of the sun when it’s especially bright.

You can also navigate with conversational commands after saying, “Hey Mercedes.” As in, you can say something like, “Hey Mercedes, I want coffee,” and your car will find you the nearest coffee spots. I used to hate voice commands because it was next to impossible to actually get what you were asking for, but this modern iteration that you see on luxury cars has really changed the game. I don’t have to think up the robotic command I’d need to change the radio station. I can just say it.

The digital dashboard was also one hell of a feature. You can cycle through tons of different displays, most of which are just mind boggling. You can literally have your navigation map displayed on your dashboard — and I don’t mean you get a little box that has navigation. The whole screen turns into a map. I’m sure some folks will enjoy it, but it was massively overwhelming for me.

As was the augmented reality navigation, which feels a little bit more video game-y than anything else. Maybe I’m just too old to appreciate these things.

The Verdict

It’s difficult to offer a verdict for a car that I can’t compare to the other vehicles in its class, I can say that the 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS450+ is a delightful vehicle that transforms much of what makes Mercedes special into a flagship luxury sedan — but it does feel like the German automaker couldn’t decide what it wanted to do. It tried to combine modern austerity with Benz’s traditional elegance, and it works… but it’s probably not going to work for everyone. It didn’t work for me, but it could very well work for you. And you know what? I respect a delightfully polarizing car.

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1938 Mercedes-Benz 540K wins Best of Show at Pebble Beach Concours

Posted on August 16, 2021 by admin

An elegantly streamlined 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540K Autobahn Kurier coupe, the sole remaining example of four originally built, won Best of Show for the 2021 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

The Mercedes is owned by Arturo and Debra Keller of Petaluma, California, and marks the third time they have won Best of Show at the world-famous California showcase, both times previously also with pre-war Mercedes-Benz cars, in 1986 and 2001.

“It’s my triple crown,” Arturo Keller said. “This is the only remaining car of its kind, and I am the second owner from new. It’s a very special car, and we are very happy.”

The car was last restored in 2006, and has continued to be shown, rallied and toured since then. The 540K also received the Elegance in Motion Trophy.

This win is the ninth Best of Show for the Mercedes-Benz brand at Pebble Beach, tying with Bugatti for the most wins.

The immaculately restored black Mercedes led a field of 235 concours entries and was one of four finalists vying for the coveted prize, all of them European cars, two of them pre-war and two from the post-war years.

The three others were a 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Corsica drophead coupe, a freshly restored 1956 Maserati A6G Zagato coupe, and a 1966 Ferrari 365 P Pininfarina Berlinetta Speciale, known as the Tre Posti for its three-passenger configuration, the driver positioned in the center.

The 540K earlier won the concours’ Mercedes-Benz pre-war class (all the finalists were class winners), and unusually, the Kellers had another car entered in the same class, a 1927 Mercedes-Benz SS Armbruster cabriolet, leading one of the show’s commentators to quip that they had been competing against themselves.

The sleek shape of the Autobahn Kurier, introduced at the Berlin Motor Show in 1938, was inspired by Mercedes-Benz’s strikingly streamlined Silver Arrow competition cars that were dominating grand prix racing at the time. German engineers had led the way in experimenting with aerodynamic forms starting in the 1920s, and this 540K model was designed for high-speed touring on Germany’s innovative network of autobahn highways.

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Mercedes Is Amping Up For The Big-Screen Arms Race

Posted on January 8, 2021 by admin

The 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS, a fully electric sedan that takes direct aim at Tesla’s top offerings, will offer an optional display screen that stretches the entire width of the dashboard. Mercedes is calling it the MBUX Hyperscreen, because it is not just a screen, it is also hyper.

MBUX, of course, is the infotainment system Mercedes introduced in 2018. The MBUX Hyperscreen will be its fullest expression to date. The screen will be bright and look slick, to be sure, with its OLED technology. It’s 56 inches wide and has 377 square inches of surface area.

But what’s most interesting to me about it is how Mercedes says it is using artificial intelligence for personalization.

Quoth Merc:

Mercedes-Benz has researched the usage behavior of the first MBUX generation, and learned that most of the use cases fall in the Navigation, Radio/Media and Phone categories. Therefore, the navigation application is always at the center of the screen unit with full functionality for ease of use. Over 20 further functions – from the active massage program to a birthday reminder, and suggestions for a to-do list – are automatically offered with the aid of artificial intelligence, if they are relevant to the customer. “Magic Modules” is the in- house name the developers have given to these suggestion modules, which are shown on the zero-layer.

Here are four use case examples. The user can either accept or reject the respective suggestion with just one click:

1. If you always call one particular person on the way home on Tuesday evenings, you will be asked to make a corresponding call on that day of the week and that specific time of day. A business card appears with their contact information and – if it’s stored – their photo will appear. All MBUX suggestions are linked to the user’s profile. If someone else drives the EQS on a Tuesday evening, this recommendation would not be made – or another one is made, depending on the preferences of the other user.

2. If the EQS driver regularly uses the hot-stone massage function featured in the optionally available Active Multicountour Seats, the system learns and automatically suggests the hot-stone massage function for the driver in colder temperatures.

3. If the user regularly uses both the heated steering wheel and heated seat functions together, MBUX intelligently suggests to enable the heated steering wheel as soon as the user turns on the heated seat.

4. The suspension of the EQS can be raised in order to offer more ground clearance. A useful function for steep driveways or speedbumps to create a smoother ride. MBUX remembers the GPS position where the user utilized the “Raise Vehicle” function. If the vehicle approaches this GPS position again, MBUX automatically suggests raising the EQS.

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All of Mercedes’ examples aren’t exactly essential, though I could see the ride height thing coming in handy if you live somewhere where you’d use it. Beyond that, the screen is an interesting glimpse into where infotainment in cars is going. (It is also far from the first big screen we’ve seen, very far.)

Mercedes, for example, is moving away from submenus — its so-called “zero-layer” has most important apps available via no menu at all — which is a welcome change because submenus are often the most annoying part of using new car infotainment. That’s also good because the thing people miss about knobs and buttons is that they put everything right there in front of you.

Gorden Wagener, head of design at Mercedes, said the strategy is basically to make technology that users don’t low-key hate all the time, as has sometimes been said about car touchscreens.

When I use MBUX, then intuitively, I didn’t have to think about whether and how. When we look at the thinking of my parents’ generation they were asking: do I want to use technology? It’s completely different today, the fusion of technology and design makes it so easy: I want to use this technology. If technology can do a lot, but I have to work out the usage, I always stay at a distance. That’s why it was important that our success is based on the idea that it must work just as well as it looks.

Here are some more pictures; don’t sleep on the vents.

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Pick of the Day: 1972 Mercedes-Benz 350SL luxury top-down cruiser

Posted on December 3, 2020 by admin

In spite of the negative things that the year 2020 has brought so many people, there’s been one reward for automotive hobbyists during the coronavirus pandemic: Additional time for project cars.

With shelter-in-place orders in effect, curfews in place, and the closure of so many social venues, many have turned their attention to the garage or workshop. One such person is a private seller on ClassicCars.com with a Mercedes-Benz SL advertised as a “COVID project.”

The Pick of the Day is a low-mileage 1972 Mercedes-Benz 350SL that has been painstakingly restored, with more than 200 hours invested over the course of this year, the seller says in the ad.

“I have restored it as if I were keeping it, using all high-quality replacement parts and correct spec fluids,” the seller states.

Presented in an image gallery that looks like it came straight out of the Mercedes-Benz promotional catalog, this SL in Cambria, California, rides on an R107 chassis and is powered by a 3.5-liter V8 paired with a 4-speed automatic transmission.

The SL label for Mercedes two-seaters stands for “super light,” with dates back to 1954 and the 300SL Gullwing race car. By the 1970s, the SL model had established a foothold in the luxury marketplace as the must-have roadster for affluent performance enthusiasts. Many SL models, like this one, came with both hard and soft tops.

The odometer on this example shows only about 29,000 original miles, which the seller believes to be original to the car. Among the items on the Mercedes’ 2020 restoration checklist were a number of service items, including recent brakes, tires and ignition work. In addition, the nearly 50-year-old carpet and interior got some much-needed TLC. The results appear to speak for themselves.

The seller has hyperlinked the vehicle ad with his personal website on, which spells out in greater detail the background of the Mercedes and its return to roadworthiness after many years of sitting in a friend’s driveway. Photos from pre-restoration are also included there.

“This SL is a sweetheart,” the seller concludes. “You can literally fly into central CA and drive this car home with no hesitation.”

Without a doubt, this seller definitely made the most of his spare time in 2020. Hopefully, he gets a chance to enjoy a few top-down cruises as a reward for his efforts before the Mercedes is sold. The asking price is $19,200.

To view this listing on ClassicCars.com, see Pick of the Day.

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