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First Drive: The 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS450+ Is A Beautiful Electric Porpoise

I Don’t Know What To Do With All This Tech

My husband used to be a sales associate at a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Montreal, and he’s spent the entire duration of our marriage telling me that no automaker is as luxuriously high-tech as Mercedes. I have never discounted this observation. I’ve just also never felt the need to drive an extremely tech-heavy car. I still have a hard time dealing with a tiny infotainment screen.

So I think it’s probably a little bit of an understatement to say that the EQS’s offerings are a bit overwhelming. After I laughed out loud at the exterior, I also laughed out loud at the absolutely massive Hyperscreen. I wanted to ask it if it was compensating for something. I wanted to ask why such a cute fella needs such a big screen.

Functionally, the Hyperscreen is great. A single piece of curved glass, it’s a gorgeous feat of technological innovation that works with rapid speed due to an eight-core processor and 24 gigabytes of RAM. You tap on anything, and there’s not going to be lag. You’re immediately transported to the place you chose to go in the infotainment system.

The graphics are also gorgeous, but again, it’s a little bit Much. There’s a screen for the driver, one of the passenger, and a tall screen in the center, and in those latter two, you can access everything from radio controls to vehicle settings to satellite maps to photo galleries to video games. I did poke around the Tetris game and found it took a while to load but was otherwise fun. I still can’t imagine myself using an infotainment screen instead of my phone for gaming, though.

Even worse, you still get a lot of glare, despite the fact that Mercedes tried its best to avoid that. There’s not really anything you’re going to be able to do about the reflection of the sun when it’s especially bright.

You can also navigate with conversational commands after saying, “Hey Mercedes.” As in, you can say something like, “Hey Mercedes, I want coffee,” and your car will find you the nearest coffee spots. I used to hate voice commands because it was next to impossible to actually get what you were asking for, but this modern iteration that you see on luxury cars has really changed the game. I don’t have to think up the robotic command I’d need to change the radio station. I can just say it.

The digital dashboard was also one hell of a feature. You can cycle through tons of different displays, most of which are just mind boggling. You can literally have your navigation map displayed on your dashboard — and I don’t mean you get a little box that has navigation. The whole screen turns into a map. I’m sure some folks will enjoy it, but it was massively overwhelming for me.

As was the augmented reality navigation, which feels a little bit more video game-y than anything else. Maybe I’m just too old to appreciate these things.

The Verdict

It’s difficult to offer a verdict for a car that I can’t compare to the other vehicles in its class, I can say that the 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS450+ is a delightful vehicle that transforms much of what makes Mercedes special into a flagship luxury sedan — but it does feel like the German automaker couldn’t decide what it wanted to do. It tried to combine modern austerity with Benz’s traditional elegance, and it works… but it’s probably not going to work for everyone. It didn’t work for me, but it could very well work for you. And you know what? I respect a delightfully polarizing car.

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I Bought The Most Reliable American Car Ever Built. Now I’m Putting It To The Test

The simplicity of the slant six engine design, its relatively modest output, and the quality of the main rotating parts (including a forged crankshaft) as well as the effective cooling and lubrication systems, meant these engines lasted forever. Find any “most reliable engines of all time” list on the internet, and the Chrysler slant six will be on it.

This is why I bought my 1965 Plymouth Valiant. I want a winter car to replace my Lexus LX470, which is a swell car, but worth too much for me to let rust out on Michigan’s salty roads, and a bit boring and thirsty, with its four-speed slushbox and ridiculous curb weight. I want something fun to drive in the winter, and few things are as fun as a three-speed column-shift manual transmission.

Image for article titled I Bought The Most Reliable American Car Ever Built. Now I'm Putting It To The Test — Image: Syd

I spotted the car on upstate New York’s Facebook Marketplace with an asking price of $2,835. Andrew and his wife Sydney drove me over an hour to a Christian bible camp, where the man who runs the place showed me his wasp-infested Valiant, which he swore had only 51,500 original miles (this, I later learned when going through the service records, was false; the notes clearly show the vehicle eclipsing 100,000 miles).

The man was nice (to me, not the wasps; he murdered them viciously — odd behavior for someone who runs a bible camp, but also maybe not), but didn’t know much about his car. He’d only owned it for a few years, and couldn’t tell me whether first gear is synchronized (it is not). Is it a bit alarming that he didn’t know the answer to that? Yes, a bit. I’ll change the transmission fluid as soon as I can to drain out chunks of those first gear teeth.

The test drive went well; motor fired up quickly, and the transmission was quiet. I handed the seller $2,000, he signed his registration, and I was off. Well, after filling the motor with a quart of oil, the radiator with nearly a gallon of coolant, and the single brake fluid reservoir with a splash of DOT 3.

Following Andrew’s Mitsubishi Montero, I drove the Valiant 60 miles from the bible camp to my friend’s house, and fell head-over-heels in love. The three-speed column-shift transmission is sublime; it’s fun to shift, and goes into all three gears (plus reverse) smoothly. The smooth-revving slant-six is just incredible, offering plenty of torque, and never stuttering under acceleration. Sure, there’s some vibration under acceleration; neither the fuel gauge nor the coolant temperature gauge works; and there’s plenty of rust on the floorboards, doors, and quarter panels (the main unibody rails are solid); but I don’t care. This regular old 1960s Plymouth sedan — with its blue interior filled with two three-person bench seats — has my heart.

Well, for now, that is. This machine still has to get me 650 miles from upstate New York to Michigan; only then will I know whether it deserves the title of “Most reliable American car ever.”

At $1,800, Could This 1992 Nissan Sentra ‘Dune Buggy’ Be All The Car You Need?

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