First Drive Review
Take a good look at the new S-class coupe. That’s right, slow down and stop clicking your mouse or swiping your screen for a few seconds. The car is gorgeous, no? But photos don’t even capture its enormous size, its presence, its curves. It is not a supermodel, a waif of a sports car designed to appeal equally to gawking adolescents and those more chronologically advanced but equally insecure. This is a modern Mercedes, fully realized.
An extra second to remember the CL-class, please, that old lady of a coupe that’s been haunting Benz dealers for years now. Okay, done with that, no eulogy needed. Mercedes sold fewer than 500 of them last year. We won’t be surprised if it finds more buyers for the new B-pillarless S550 in the first month of sales, which likely will be October. Pricing has yet to be announced, but expect it to start near $120,000.
So, the S-class coupe is expensive, yes. As it should be, for a car that stands atop the Mercedes product range. Fire up the 4.7-liter twin-turbocharged V-8, and the exhaust rumbles louder than the S-class sedan’s, despite the fact that it’s the same engine making the same 449 horsepower and 516 lb-ft of torque. The coupe feels quicker to accelerate, shift, and shed speed. Cutting 8.7 inches of wheelbase makes it a sportier proposition than the sedan, and when we finally get one on our scales, the coupe should be lighter by a couple hundred pounds, if Mercedes is to be believed. Sprinting through traffic in the land of Gucci, the S550 coupe feels more nimble than any CL ever has, despite measurements that track within a few inches of its predecessor’s in every dimension.
Like the sedan, the coupe has every manner of modern technology built in or ready for order. This is a car that can massage you while perfuming the air you breathe; that can drive itself for short bursts and brake for you when your attention falters. Its enormous glass roof can turn as opaque as the average driver’s understanding of the engineering that underlies these systems. Driving the S550 coupe, you almost feel sorry for the product planners and engineers, under such intense pressure to come up with One More Thing.
For the S-class coupe, that feature is “active curve tilting,” a function of the car’s active suspension system that works up to 112 mph. This predictive system scans the road up to 49 feet ahead with a stereoscopic camera and then hydraulically adjusts each spring perch independently to compensate for up to three inches of body motion versus the standard air suspension. Now, the caveat is that we’re not getting this technology on the S550 coupe (or the S63 AMG coupe) here in the U.S. Our cars will all be fitted with four-wheel drive, and active curve tilting is restricted to rear-drive cars.
That’s okay by us. Having driven a rear-drive S500 (European models wear different badging, but it’s the same car as our S550), we wouldn’t feel bad if someone called active curve tilting a gimmick. To be clear: We’re not. But we didn’t find the experience pleasurable, as it made handling unpredictable. And we don’t see the point in developing technology that purposely removes essential feedback from the driving experience. Thankfully, curve tilting can be turned off, and the Comfort and Sport settings of the ABC suspension deliver what they promise.
The interior of the S-class coupe is nearly indistinguishable from the sedan’s. A proper three-spoke steering wheel replaces the odd two-spoke unit in the sedan, and the coupe gets the new touch-pad controller for the infotainment system just like in the newest C-class. Our test car was fitted with the special “Edition 1” treatment, so its dashboard inserts resemble a vintage Telefunken radio, with flowing lines on a piano black background. A crystal nodule on the center console serves as the touch point to pop open the cover of the storage bin. Subtle but effective. Less understated are the Swarovski crystals available in the headlamp assemblies, 17 each in the daytime running lamps and 30 in the turn-signal indicators, although none in the LED headlights themselves.
The S-class coupe is every bit as regal as its sedan counterpart. Yet when you open one of the two four-and-a-half-foot-long doors and slide into the quilted leather seats, everything seems a bit more opulent. Maybe it’s the tidier four-place package or the steeper windshield rake. Or perhaps it’s just the aftereffect of staring at the exterior sheetmetal. What’s unquestionable is this car’s position as Stuttgart’s new flagship.
