Mercedes-Benz S 500
Can someone please explain what a scart lead is for? Designed to not quite fit in the socket, its prime function, so far as I can see, is to work itself loose and then fall into that unreachable vat of spaghetti that lives behind your television set.If by some miracle you are able to find it again, you are then faced with the problem of putting it back. Hard enough when there’s only one socket, but round the back of your home entertainment system these days there are usually 350.
The other day I called in a man to fix some aspect of my television and he found the last bloke I’d called two weeks earlier still round the back, still pushing wires into other wires in the vague hope that some kind of picture could be restored.
In the olden days I was a dab hand at electrical engineering, but now I am utterly at a loss. It is impossible — impossible d’you hear — to tune a modern-day television and if your Sky+ box breaks, which it will, every 15 minutes, you cannot hope to effect a repair yourself. You must ring a man in Bombay who, after 15 minutes, will put you through to a lady in Scotland who will tell you — I’m not kidding — to tap the interactive card on your finger nails before putting it back. And then . . . it still won’t work. So you have to call out another man to join the last bloke who’s still there helping the previous chap find the right effing scart lead.
In my house I have Sky+ in the big sitting room for when I’m watching what I call the home cinema. And what my friends call the VulgarSonic. And then in the small sitting room there’s normal Sky that feeds various other TVs in various other outposts. I do not know how they’re all linked up. But I do know that if I press the red button to vote for Jack Dee or watch a weather forecast, the phone in my office makes some burping noises and then breaks.
Out comes a telephone engineer, who uses a sonic screwdriver to perform witchcraft and then goes away leaving us with a fully functioning phone system. But a plate of hash on the television. And when the man comes to fix that he breaks the phones again.
How can this be? How can we live in an age where your television rings your telephone 480 times a day? And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Only this time there’s no burping noise.
Instead, and this is absolutely true, the home phone rings like clockwork every three minutes. Day and night. How can this be? How can we live in an age where your television rings your telephone 480 times a day? And there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
I wish I was joking here. But I promise I’m not. When the engineer who’d been summoned to fix the Sky+ in the big sitting room left, the normal Sky in all the other rooms went down. And after the man who came to mend that went away, we lost signal to all the upstairs sets, and after the man who fixed that drove off the system in the big sitting room showed only blue and purple lines. And it was hard to call for help because the phone was talking to the television 24 hours a day. I simply cannot remember a time when all the televisions and telephones worked simultaneously.
Oh, and I nearly forgot. In case the Sky+ goes wrong again we now have a DVD recorder to go with the normal DVD player, the amp, the projector, the PlayStation and the hi-fi. That’s six remotes, each of which has a minimum of 20 buttons. Fine. But if you accidentally sit on one of them you have no clue which one it was and what you should press to make everything work again.
Of course you stab away, going into menus and endless sub-menus until eventually you are so completely baffled by the electronic maze you have no option but to summon the man, who by this stage will arrive in a Maybach.
Things ought to be better in my office because there is wireless internet and a wireless keyboard. Fat chance. Twenty-three things need a plug socket in here and each of these 23 things needs to be connected to all the other things. That’s 520 pieces of flex. And with an average length of 6ft, that’s more than half a mile of knotted wiring. Half a bloody mile.
And none of it ever works properly, which is why I approached the new Mercedes S-class last week with such fear and dread.
Let us take, as a tiny example, the driver’s seat. You can make it go up and down electrically but in addition you can heat it up slightly, slightly more, or a lot. You can also adjust the support for your thighs, your lower back, your upper back, the bit in between, your neck, your head and your shoulder blades. I haven’t finished yet. You can select how firmly you’d like the side bolsters to grip you in the corners and as a pièce de résistance, what sort of massage you’d like as you drive along. Slow and gentle. Slow and fast. Fast and gentle, or the Bangkok special, fast and vigorous.
Choose one and pressure pads in the seat itself inflate, deflate and move about as though the chair was full of Thai girls playing naked Twister. I liked it a lot. But think how much wiring is needed to achieve this. And then double it, because exactly the same options are available to the passenger.
And this is just the start, because then you’ve got the infrared camera that sees into the darkness way beyond the reach of the normal headlamps and projects the image on to a screen on the dashboard. Sadly, this doesn’t work when the car is stationary. Mercedes says it’s because the beam could hurt someone’s eyes if they looked at it for long enough, but that’s rubbish. I know perfectly well it’s to stop anyone using the S-class for dogging.
Not that you need to dog in an S-class because this is the first car in the world to receive digital television. So you can watch pornography. While getting the full ladyboy.
Annoyingly, you can’t watch television while on the move. I don’t know why because it is impossible to crash an S-class. Sensors in the radiator grille note when the car in front is stopping and you’re brought to a halt as well. But not so violently that the car behind smashes into your boot lid.
I really liked this feature, especially in stop/go motorway traffic. It meant I didn’t need to look out of the window, which meant I had more time for playing with all the other stuff. The voice-activated controls for the sat nav (which knows where traffic jams are), the home cinema (I’m not joking) and the phone. The endless combinations of interior lighting. And the trip computer. I could even get it to scroll through the pictures on my camera, putting a slide show on the dash.
If you add all this up, along with the wiring needed for the engine and the computer-controlled suspension and the stuff needed to make sure you don’t watch TV when you’re driving, the result is 1,970 metres of wiring . . . more than a mile of cabling. And here’s the really annoying thing. It all worked. When I turned on the indicators, the phone didn’t ring. When I asked for a massage, the infrared camera didn’t burn my dog’s eyes out.
I am therefore seriously thinking of getting someone from Mercedes to come and mend my house.
And you? Well, if you want the most jaw-dropping piece of technology to be fitted with four wheels, you must have the S-class. And you must tick all the option boxes.
Of course, you may need to know first what it’s like as a car. Well it seemed pretty faultless but I can’t be sure about that. Unfortunately it’s hard to think about fuel consumption or handling when you’re watching the world whiz by in infrared and an imaginary Vietnamese girl is rubbing baby oil into your coccyx.
And for some details:
Model: Mercedes S 500
Engine: type 5461cc, eight cylinders
Power: 388bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque: 391 lb ft @ 2800-4800rpm
Transmission: Seven-speed automatic
Fuel: 24.1mpg
CO² : 279g/km
Acceleration 0-62mph: 5.6sec
Top speed: 155mph
Price: £69,815
Verdict: Best entertainment system on the road
Gotta Love Jeremy Clarkson!
