NEW Mercedes S-Class Review: Innovation or Overkill?

We have a heated steering wheel, which I shall be trying out later on. Feels like a normal... Not a steering wheel, is it? This is the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class. And it's not just a car. It's not just a beacon of technological evolution. This, according to Mercedes, is home. Which is quite a bold statement, really, because my home doesn't have an illuminated grille that's 20% larger than the one on my previous gaffer. Or a light-up star on the front. Except maybe at Christmas. But for Mercedes, home isn't all about bricks and mortar. It's about that unmistakable feeling of total serenity and craftsmanship you get the second you shut the door. It's an ambition they've been perfecting for 140 years. Ever since in 1886, Karl Benz filed that first patent for the motorcar. This motorcar, the first motorcar, the Benz patent motorwagen. Without this thing, there'd be no car YouTube. There'd be no cars. I might not have a job. I might be a roller skate journalist. I want to have a go in this later. Yes, for 140 years, the S-Class, in its many, many guises, from OG to later generations, spread across 14 decades, has been both Genesis and the North Star for the entire industry. But for 2026, they've decided to write a new chapter. So what do we need to know about this 2026 S-Class? Well, 50% of this car is either brand new or has been updated. And that includes this star on the bonnet, which can be illuminated if you live in the American market. Us Brits, we don't get that. Far too flashy. It's just a normal star. You can get in the UK, though, this big illuminated grille. As I said, it's 20% larger than before. And if you look around the edges, look, it lights up. Very star encrusted, very large, very imposing without being too in your face. You also get these new digital light headlamps with a twin star motif, and they deliver a 40% larger illumination field than before. They use micro LED technology and can project high definition safety symbols directly onto the road, like arrows for roadworks or warnings for pedestrians. In profile, it is classic S-Class, lovely saloon design. Side note, if you want to customise your S-Class, you can get it on the Manufaktur personalisation programme, which offers 150 different colours, including a lovely black sparkling finish that looks like the paint is dripping with diamonds. Or you can just get it in silver or black. Right, quick note on these door handles. Very stylish, illuminated, obviously, but also slightly annoying because it's just one extra step to press the thing and wait for them to pop out before you can open the door. Speaking of which, quick sound check on the door. Not bad, not as good as the old school S-Class is, but you don't need to slam it. You can, of course, just use the soft close. Nice. You get a variety of wheel options on this car, but more interestingly, the S-Class now comes with 4.5 degree rear axle steering as standard. If you tick the box for the 10 degree option, the rear wheels turn even more aggressively, reducing the turning circle by almost two metres. And then there's the back end, which is probably the most distinctive angle on the new S-Class. This is where you're going to tell whether it's the current generation or the previous generation because the lights stand out. They really do. You've got this triple three-pointed star design in the rear clusters. You've also got twin exhausts on this S500 version and a pretty decent sized boot as well. The boot size hasn't changed dramatically, nor has its shape, but there's enough room in there for several briefcases. So the exterior is a masterclass in understated design, but to see if it really delivers that welcome home feeling, we've got to step inside. Might have to take my shoes off for this one. Bear with. Come on. See, my home doesn't do that. Sorry about that. For one fleeting moment, I thought I was home. Anyway, quite nice in there, don't you think? Especially in this colour. Very, very bluey-greeny. Anyway, lots going on in terms of new design. You've got a new centre console, which is this sparkling finish. New dashboard, new steering wheel, new door cards and new screens, of course. I feel like we need to talk about these screens though, actually, because it feels like Mercedes have jumped the shark slightly and all they're doing these days is just slapping screens on their dashboards and not allowing their designers to come up with any interesting designs. I feel like we need to make dashboards great again. If you agree with me, leave a comment and also hit the like button. If you make enough noise, Mercedes will listen. Customer feedback led to them designing a new steering wheel with physical rocker switches for the cruise control and a roller for the volume knob. Sadly, there are precious few buttons anywhere else, but the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class has all the usual niceties. 100 watt USB-C charging, ambient lighting, including illuminated cup holders, wireless phone charging, a dedicated screen for your passenger, which does pretty much exactly what the main screen does, and plenty more. There are plenty of other new bits in the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class, including this bad boy here. This is, believe it or not, a heated seat belt. This heats up to 44 degrees Celsius. I'll be trying that out later, but it goes really well with the heated armrests and also the heated steering wheel. Another addition, digital vent controls. They can be adjusted manually, but driver and passenger can select presets that automatically point the vents to your head, body, or somewhere in between. Bit of a faff, but still very cool. Finally, though, there's also a new air filtration system, which can ionize and remove particles that are 1,200 times smaller than a grain of salt. I think that's a good thing. The other big new feature in the Mercedes-Benz S-Class is a state-of-the-art supercomputer, which powers everything from driver assistance systems to infotainment, and it's incredibly feature-rich. We'll test the speed. Yep, that looks fairly nippy. Almost as quick as an iPhone. Actually, yeah, on a par with an iPhone, I would say. And in terms of features, loads going on in here. We've got all the usual stuff, including radio and media playback, but also loads of apps as well. You've got Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and, of course, the ability to customize the interior colors plus loads of entertainment features, including Disney+, YouTube Video, and more. It's also got ChatGPT baked in, so you can have a conversation with it while you drive. Let's try it now. Hey, Mercedes. Can you switch to English? Okay, fine. How big is the average horse? I think she's answering me in German, even though I asked the question in English, but it's the correct answer to the question, even though I can't understand the answer. I mean, if that's not clever, I don't know what is. Right, time to experience the S-Class on the move, where I'm sure it'll be utterly wonderful, probably. But before I set off, I decided to see where it all started by having a very quick spin in the S-Class's grandfather, the patent motorbike. That's mad. Left to go right? Yeah. Right to go left? Yeah. Oh. This lever, smooth in front. Smooth, okay. And for braking, pull back, yeah. Okay, are you ready? Yeah. Where's the seatbelts? No seatbelt. No airbags? You want to have a helmet? No, I'm all right. Right, here we go. Here we go. Oh my God, oh my God, we're moving. This is so cool. I feel like Bertha Benz. Right, that is quite possibly the coolest thing I've ever done. When you're in an S-Class, there's one thing you generally have to focus on, and that is refinement. But actually, you don't even have to focus on it. It just finds you. This car is incredibly smooth. It's very quiet and extremely relaxing to drive. And you feel that immediately. But there's one thing I really want to focus on, and that is this heated seatbelt situation. So, hey Mercedes, turn on my heated seatbelt. Looking forward to this. All right, I'll turn on the seatbelt heating and activate the connection to the seat heating. Right, so you've got to have the seatbelt with the steering wheel and your armrest on at the same time. But it does work. It really does. It gets to 44 degrees really quickly, and you can feel it. It's not that noticeable if you're wearing a thick top, but you can feel it on your shoulders. It's a bit like having a nice warm hug. Let me try this, actually. I'm going to tuck the lap belt across my belly. Oh, yes. That is just brilliant. You can feel that warmth across your stomach and then the warmth in your elbows from the armrests, the warmth from your fingertips in the steering wheel. And then I've got my little pillow back here. Hey Mercedes, turn on the massage feature. All right, I'm switching on the massage for you. Oh my God. This car is dangerously comfortable. You could honestly fall asleep in this. We have to mention the ride. The S-Class includes airmatic air suspension as standard, and it uses intelligent damping so the car can soften up the ride based on different types of bumps, either big or small. It uses a system called Mercedes Intelligent Cloud. And what it means is that if this S-Class goes into a speed bump, it can log the location of that speed bump and then upload that location to the cloud so that if other Mercedes cars go along the same road, they can soften up their suspension before they get to that speed bump so they don't feel that thud when they go over it. I mean, it's a cool idea, but how useful is it? I mean, it'd be permanently switched on in the UK because everywhere has potholes. And then in a place like Germany where there aren't any potholes, it will never get used. So nice idea, but yeah, practical, maybe not. What is useful is the rear axle steering. The rear wheels can turn in the opposite direction to the front wheels by 4.5 degrees as standard or optionally up to 10 degrees, making everyday maneuvering situations noticeably easier. At higher speeds, the rear wheels steer in parallel with the front wheels to deliver more stability. Okay, let's give it a little go and see how good the turning circle is. There we go. Put it in reverse. You can see the rear wheels actually moving, even in the rear view mirror. And look at that, that turning circle's not bad. That's pretty decent for a big car. Another useful convenience feature is MB Drive Assist, which includes the ability for the car to drive almost by itself. The new S-Class has dozens of sensors, including 12 ultrasonic sensors, 10 external cameras, five radar sensors, and an algorithm trained on large amounts of data, which allow the car to steer, accelerate, and brake unassisted. It will even change lane automatically on the motorway simply by indicating, and around town, it will stop at traffic lights. MB Drive Assist Pro will allow fully autonomous point-to-point driving, although only in China initially. US and Europe will get this feature at a later date. On the subject of automatic driving, the new S-Class has another useful trick that might come in handy, especially for those people who can't reverse very well, especially the folks who live in a mansion with especially long driveways and annoying families. So picture the scene. You've just left your mansion. You've had your breakfast. You said goodbye to your family and you're all set to pop out and have a nice day of doing business deals. You've got your keys. You've got your phone. And you jump in the whip. You're all set for a lovely day of S-Classing and then off you pop, leaving your mansion behind you, down your expansive driveway, say goodbye to your family, and then you realize, I've actually forgotten something, haven't I? Yeah, I've forgotten my wallet. I've forgotten my wallet. Oh, goodness me. But you're not very confident when it comes to reversing. So what do you do? You use the S-Class's new automatic reversing feature. You press this and then the car will go exactly backwards in the path that you did. You've got to accelerate by yourself and brake by yourself, but the car will steer in the exact opposite movements to what you did to put you back, in theory, on your mansion driveway. Right, here we go, around the corner. It does slow down. So even though you're accelerating quite hard, my foot is near the floor right now, it slows down for safety reasons. But once it gets a bit straighter, it should speed up. Oh, I've got an alert from my butler saying I've forgotten my wallet. Yep, I know, mate. And look at that. I am exactly back in the same place where I started. It does stop quite abruptly, but yeah, look at that. It can do that over a course of 150 meters in reverse. Cool. Although BMW have been doing that for years, so maybe not that cool. Right, I did promise I would show you the back of the S-Class, and here it is. These are the best seats in the house, by the way. So the car comes in either short wheelbase or long wheelbase, although in the UK, we'll only get the long wheelbase version. That's this one. And when you get this car, you have a choice of seat configurations. You can have either two individual first-class style seats or a five-seater layout, which is what we've got here. Although I'd hesitate to call it a five-seater because this middle seat is unfeasibly hard and you're not going to want to sit there. Not that anyone would really. However, the other two seats are brilliant. In between them, you have this center console, which folds down very nicely to reveal a space for an optional refrigerator. Although we don't have the fridge in this car, just a kind of load-through area to give you access to the boot. But we do have a lot of goodies in here. This armrest opens up to reveal another wireless phone charger and some storage and two more USB-C ports, plus these pop-out cup holders, which are very handy. I'm still not sure what this bit does, though. I thought it was for a mobile phone, but it's a bit too sort of skinny to hold a mobile phone. So I don't know what that is. Answers on a postcard or in the comments down below. We've also got this new rear seat entertainment remote control system. So cast your eyes upon these. These are your new rear seat entertainment screens. I'll log in and I'll show you that you can actually do pretty much what you can do in the front infotainment system, and that is to control the phone, the media, you can play games and watch YouTube, all that good stuff. And if you don't want to point your finger at the screen, you can deploy these two mobile phone-style controllers to control each one of these screens. Now, I had a play of these previously in the prototype version, and they weren't very good. But let me have a quick little play to see if they actually work in the final production car. I'm pressing the on button. Can you hear that? And nothing appears to be happening. See, this is the problem. They're a good idea in practice, but what's wrong with just using your finger? Look at that. I'll press on and it comes on. Yeah, these, I'm just not convinced by them. I think they look brilliant, but they are just utterly pointless. Anyway, seats are brilliant. Really comfortable. These pillows, gorgeous, with the 140 years of innovation emblem. Absolutely amazing. And if you're lucky enough to sit in the best seat in the house, that's this one behind the front passenger, then this whole thing will recline and just give you a foot rest and a massage and heating. And honestly, it is just, it's just brilliant to sit in. It's an S-Class. It's an S-Class indeed, which means the tech toys don't stop there. Mercedes has developed a new automatic parking system that's more advanced than the previous one. So I found a parking space. It's just up there. I want to see if this car will actually put me in that space without me doing much work. So I'll pull up just ahead of the space, put it in reverse, choose my parking space by pressing that, hit park now, and then the car should do the rest. Hazards have gone on. I'm accelerating. Nothing's happening. Okay, now we're moving, all right. Are we going in the space? No, we've completely blown past that space. Where are we going? Where are we going, S-Class? Oh, it stopped. Now it's turning right. I'm accelerating, nothing's happening. Oh, now we're going forward. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so this is not the way I would have done it. Shout out to this part of the screen though. That gives you a bird's eye view of the car so you can see exactly what's going on and see underneath the car. That's cool. Okay, now we're going backwards. Yeah, now we're going into the space. I mean, it's made a bit of a meal of it, if I'm being honest. I probably could have done that in one go, but at least we are in the space. Well, actually, no, we're not in the space. I'm sticking out by a mile. Needs work. Let's talk engines, shall we? The S-Class comes with a variety of engine choices. You've got petrol, you've got diesel, you've got plug-in hybrid, you've got six-cylinder, you've got eight-cylinder. The top-of-the-line model has a V8 with a flat-plane crank. It's similar to the engine you've got in the C63 and the E63 and even in Aston Martins like the DB11 and DB12, but in the S-Class, it's got some upgrades, including that new flat-plane crank. Sadly, S-Classes in the UK won't get that engine option, but that's a massive shame because that thing is a beast. In this car, it will make 537 horsepower and 650 newton-meters of torque. But still, we do get some decent engines. The car I'm driving today, which we will get in the UK, is the S500. It uses a six-cylinder petrol, making 450 horsepower and 600 newton-meters of torque. It's a versatile engine that's both smooth and refined when cruising and surprisingly enjoyable when you need to get a move on, thanks to improvements, including a more powerful electric auxiliary compressor, optimized intake and exhaust ports and a revised intake camshaft. It's got a feature called over-torque, so when you floor it, you get more torque than normal. It goes up from 600 newton-meters to 640 newton-meters and it does take off. It's got a decent sound to it as well. I guess the only downside is that it's attached to a nine-speed gearbox, which is kind of tuned for smoothness at low speed. But when you're accelerating hard, the gear changes are a little bit slow and clunky, but we can forgive it because it's an S-Class. Now, obviously, the S-Class is not a sports car, but the handling is still pretty decent. It doesn't feel as big as you'd expect it to and that's partly down to the fact that it's got that rear-wheel steering. It's also very stable as well, so you can chuck it into a corner and it actually holds its line pretty nicely. The body control is pretty decent as well. It doesn't stay flat in the bends, obviously. It's an S-Class. It moves around a fair bit, but it does feel organic and you can trust the thing in the bends, as long as you don't go too crazy. Now, one question I have in my mind is, what's the top speed? Let's go find out. Right. Empty Autobahn. 911 GT2 RS in front. No speed limits. Let's send it. 220. 230. 240. 255 kph. Right, so I just hit 257 kilometres an hour. What's that in miles per hour? I'll ask the car. Mercedes, what's 257 kilometres an hour in miles per hour? 257 kilometres per hour is approximately 159.7 miles per hour. About 160 is the top speed. Official, according to the car. 140 years into the story of the automobile, the legacy of Carl Benz remains as profound as ever. One man, supported by the indomitable spirit of his wife, Bertha, ignited a global movement. We've journeyed from what was essentially a motorised tricycle to a supercomputer on wheels that can think and drive for itself. We've come a long way. And honestly, they've knocked it out of the park. The S-Class has always innovated at every stage. It's always led the charge for luxury saloons. And this iteration, while not a major departure from previous generations, moves the game on without upsetting the formula. It's proof that while the world moves faster, Mercedes has mastered the art of bringing you home the moment you shut the door. Beyond the tech and the prestige, this is a brilliant, engaging car that ensures you've arrived long before you reach your destination.