Mercedes E500 Sport Saloon
Price £48,605
Top speed 155mph
Acceleration 0-62 in 5.3 seconds
Consumption 24.6mpg (combined)
Eco rating 3/10
At the wheel Colin Montgomerie
Top gadget Surround-sound system
In a word Prestigious
With the peerlessly suave, overwhelmingly executive E-Class saloon, Mercedes brings us the world's first "intelligent headlight system". Well, what does one look for in a car headlight if not intelligence and a sense of humour?
At speeds above 55mph, your lights cunningly brighten and broaden, handing you up to 50m further of illuminated motorway in which to spot police cars. Meanwhile, the low beam bulbs are arranged in a special "country mode", lighting the left edge of the road more fiercely, thus removing some of the stress of fumbling along lanes at night and increasing the opportunity to dazzle rabbits. What do rabbits look for in a car's headlight? We don't really know. But we do know that, with the arrival of intelligent headlight systems, life just got a little bit worse for them. Ditto hedgehogs.
As if that weren't enough, this sumptuous, company director-class chariot also features disco brake lights. When the brakes are applied hard, the red lights flash, rather than glow, on the grounds that drivers respond, on average, 0.2 seconds faster to a flashing light - a reduction that, at 62mph, would evidently hand the person behind you another car length in which to get their stopping done. Meanwhile, alarmed by your heavy braking, the car braces itself for impact. A Swat team of electric pulses charges around inside, slamming the windows, fastening the sun roof, tightening the seat belts and returning your electronic seat to the optimum crash-buffering position. Time permitting, obviously.
Pretty soon the E-Class will be able to pilot you home while you sleep in the back or catch up on some reading. Which would have its advantages, though the loss of some of the old self-asserting pleasures of driving could be hard to bear.
Of course, none of this electronic stuff comes cheap. By the time they'd finished attaching kudos-stoking extras to my test model, the price was north of £53,000. Not even the headlights could pick it out up there. It drove like a dream - soft, silent, yet freakishly powerful - but so it should for that money.
Still, at least you get a hood ornament, or "ostentatious metal price tag", as some think of them. That said, unofficial statistics reveal that the average life expectancy of a Mercedes hood ornament in a UK urban setting is 2.4 days. Traditional re-use options are as a retro chest medallion and as a fairground worker's lip-ring, so demand is unlikely to slacken any time soon.
I blame Mercedes for making the thing so twisty. Even if you aren't a freelance jewellery maker, you can't help but be a touch curious about how firmly it's attached - enough to have a little poke and see. They might have gone for something more solid and visibly durable. A bust of a furrow-browed German car engineer, perhaps. Or, as a mark of respect from the makers of the world's first intelligent headlight system, a rabbit.
