The worrying joy of warm elbows

Friday, 17 August 2018

The Mercedes-Benz S560 coupe is a veritable blitzkrieg of luxury. Including the ability to warm your elbows.

OPINION: With a basic asking price of $257,600, the Mercedes-Benz S560 coupe is undoubtedly a one-percenter's car.

To make it into that particularly exclusive club, apparently you need a gross income of roughly US$400k (NZ$550,000), which counts me and most other people out by a truly laughable degree, but puts the quarter-million dollar Merc easily within their reach.

As a result, the S560 is a technological tour de force, bristling with cutting-edge assists and luxuries that the top one per cent expect in their exclusive luxo-barges.

It's not quite limousine-like in its ride, but it's also not at all limousine-like in its handling either. Which is a very good thing.

Which, I must admit, does leave me with something of a moral dilemma. While the tech-nerd part of me utterly loves the S560 for all its ultra-tech superiority, the anti-authority vaguely anarchist remnants lurking deep inside me from younger days want to take it to the nearest private golf club and set it on fire in the car park.

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But the tech-nerd part is, fortunately, stronger at this stage of my life, so the big uber-fuehrer Benz is safe from the flames and I am happy to merely blast anti-socially loud angry guitar-based music from it at the traffic lights instead.

Long, sleek and low, the S560's looks disguise just how big it actually is.

But there is one feature on the S560 that worries me deeply. Mainly because I love it so much. It is the wonderfully silly, absolutely unnecessary, aggravatingly hedonistic 'Warmth Comfort Package'.

Optional on the coupe and standard on the cabrio, the Warmth Comfort Package compliments the standard heated front seats by adding heated rear seats and a heated steering wheel, as well as something that, when I heard was actually a thing, made me screw up my nose and think 'well that's a bit silly' - a heated centre console lid and front door armrests.

Superbly comfortable seats are heated, have a massage function and 'active' bolsters to hold you in place.

Yes, really. We have, as a species, finally made it to the point in our 'civilisation' where someone, somewhere almost certainly actually uttered the phrase 'our customers will want warm elbows.'

And that grates my small internal anarchist deeply and fundamentally. How have we actually got to the stage where the super-rich have the option to gently warm their elbows when driving, while vast numbers of people struggle and suffer on a daily basis? How can we live with ourselves knowing that money has been invested in this sort of thing when it could be… OH MY GOD THIS IS AMAZING AND I DEARLY LOVE IT AND NEED IT IN MY LIFE RIGHT NOW!

Yeah, I'll admit it - my hidden inner anarchist was effortlessly shut down mid-rant as soon as I cranked up the warmth program in the S560's ridiculously extensive climate menu and experienced the deeply spiritually satisfying enlightenment of having my elbows warmed by expensive, luxuriously supple leather as I edged forward in heavy traffic on a winter's morning.

Now, I am not a 'cold' person. My internal thermostat is set high - cats love me (not a love that is necessarily returned) because I give off heat. I am the one wandering around in a T-shirt when other people have broken out the gloves and scarves. But as soon as I felt that rich, soft leather gently warming my elbows I was sold. I'm sorry, but I was.

But the S560 also packs other things I rather like as well, such as Mercedes' thoroughly excellent Distronic adaptive cruise control system that now includes the ability to actually brake the vehicle for corners because the car is clever enough to use GPS to identify what is ahead.

This a superbly good system. When it works.

As Mercedes goes to great pains to point out, it is still very much still an 'assist' - it doesn't recognise other cars at roundabouts and intersections, for example, and neither does it recognise stop signs, so the driver still needs to be paying attention, which is just as well, because some of New Zealand's tighter back roads can confound it sometimes.

There's always plenty of time for you to take over (providing you are paying attention which, of course, you are, right?), but the system is still obviously better suited to blasting effortlessly across Europe without hardly ever having to touch the brakes. Or consider the plight of the proletariat.

Other things? Superb seats, a remarkable amount of customisation (interior lighting, dash displays, etc) that means you can make it look subtly classy or as garish as a Tokyo nightclub on the inside (which I most certainly did do) and that thoroughly wonderful menacing rumble from the glorious 345kW/700Nm 4.0-litre bi-turbo V8 are, of course, highlights, as is the performance from that engine, but there are a few niggles.

The ride, while nothing other than remarkably civilised, is never quite as magic-carpet-floaty-plush as you would expect from an S-class (its impressive agility in Sport and Sport+ modes is no doubt the reason for this), while the fact that I could never get the seat low enough for my liking grated.

This seat height thing is possibly a sign that the S560 is aimed squarely at specific type of one-percenter. Someone perhaps a bit smaller due to an advanced age. Someone who appreciates the fact that, when it is in 'Comfort' mode the throttle mimics the long travel, languid power-on of Mercedes' of old. Someone who made his money (let's not kid ourselves - it's gonna be a man) the old-fashioned way - by wringing the blood, sweat and tears out of the working class. Someone who truly appreciates having warm elbows.

A rich old man. I'm talking about a rich old man.

And that is what worries me about the S560, because I am certainly not rich, which leaves only one answer as to why I like having my elbows warmed by a car so much…