Motoring
Big beauty
Alan Judd
My cousin's company car is a four- litre Jaguar Sovereign. He needs something Comfortable because his business mileage is 30,000-50,000 miles a year. From 2002, however, Gordon Brown will tax him to the tune of £7,200 a year out of already taxed income for the privilege of driving his mobile office. Unsurprisingly, he ain't gonna do it. He'll still need a company car but he'll get something under two litres, which carries a lower CO2 and price-related tax burden, and put up with the increased noise, vibration, pressure, back pain etc. This puts me in a difficult position. On the one hand, there are my natural cousinly sympathies, my liking for big cars and dis- approval of any increase in taxation; on the oth.er, there is awareness of how the large British company car sector has for years W, orked against the interests of the private buyer, both in quality and price, and also a smidgen of mean-spirited gloating because I've never been able to get my own sticky hands on one.
All this was much on my mind during the contented week I spent with the new £49,075 Mercedes S320 saloon, the succes- sor S Class to the big slab-sided model associated with Eighties and Nineties fat cats (The Spectator, 7 June 1997). In fact, that earlier model always reminded me not so much of fat cats — who anyway tend to be rather trim these days — as of an ele- gant designer tank, minus tracks, turret and gun. That was not, to my eye, a drawback, but Mercedes evidently thought otherwise because they've made the new one smaller, smoother, rounder and more discreet. They reckon they've done this without compro- mising interior space and comfort, narrow- ing but lengthening the cabin. There is also a galaxy of technical improvements, rang- ing from increases in engine power and economy (it averaged a surprising 27 mpg during our week together), through elec- tronically enhanced cornering and ride control to a device that permits you to enter, start, drive, stop, lock, alarm and leave the car without using a key.
There is a key, though it doesn't look much like one, and there is a hole into which you can put it if you can't kick the habit. But attached to it is a small chip- board which, carried in your hand, pocket or handbag, enables you to open the car merely by touching the door handle with any part of yourself and to start it by press- ing down on the gear-shift (with your foot on the brake). It's the sort of unnecessary convenience that, as with tea bags and sliced bread, I begin by despising and end up using. It's particularly handy if you've got squealing pigs under your arms.
And, of course, it goes like a rocket, albeit a very smooth, balanced and quietly double-glazed rocket. With the previous S Class there was just the faintest suspicion that the straight six engine (as opposed to the larger V8) was having to work a bit, but in this model it's effortless. Features such as the individually-variable climate control, the one-touch Tiptronic automatic gearbox and (as an option) the radar-operated Dis- tronic intelligent cruise control (which keeps you at a safe distance from the vehi- cle in front) will help ensure that this car deservedly does very well. Some motoring press reports have described it as the best saloon in the world. It may be. It's certainly one of the best looking.
But yet — 'Fie upon but yet!' exclaimed Cleopatra, who would doubtless have pre- ferred this barge to hers — one would not be properly alive if one could not find nig- gles. As with the Mercedes ML, the gear- shift seems designed for left-hand drive cars, while the boot lid is difficult to shut with one hand (it's easy on my 1991 BMW 7 series) and it's irritating to have electric seats without a memory as standard. My big niggle, though, amounts to a criticism, albeit one that might not be shared by the majority: they have compromised too far on interior space. Sunroofs lower headlin- ings and the long-backed may find they have to let the seat right down in order not to be too close. Getting in and out is not quite the gracious experience it was in the old barge and overall there is not the same luxurious sense of space. Big Mercedes should be big and it is not clear that this, though a car of the first water, has a really significant advantage over its cheaper E Class sibling, which looks (I haven't tried it) little or no less roomy.
Meanwhile, my cousin's plight prompts the thought that, within a year or two, the market might be flooded by asylum-seek- ing, ex-company luxury cars. This Mer- cedes, for instance, would be taxed even more than the Jaguar. Who's going to buy these beauties, if companies don't? The only compensation is that a general col- lapse might bring one of the earlier slab- sided designer tanks within my grasp at last. That, frankly, is still the one I'd go for.
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