Well I recently had a few chances to drive something a bit different from the scooby I normally drive for a weekend. As one of the cars in question also happened to look pretty good (at least in my opinion) I of course had to do a little photoshoot. Being interested in pretty much anything with an internal combustion engine in it, it goes without saying that I also tested all its abilities pretty thouroughly so thinking about this week’s photo friday, I thought why not just have a go at a bit of a car review. So I present to you, the Mercedes-Benz CLS500:
Now, obviously, with you all being carnuts the reaction from 83% of you will be exactly that: „boooooh, it’s not even an AMG!!“. Well of course I would have taken the CLS63 if it had been possible, but let me tell you this much, the CLS500 isn’t too shabby either.
It doesn’t have a gazillion horsepower and carbon everything but it does have Mercedes‘ newest 4.7L V8 which, with the help of a pair of turbos, generates 408PS. This doesn’t make it a rocketship but it makes it a pretty capable autobahn stormer with plenty of grunt available at pretty much any rpm you wish. This makes sense when you look at the torque figures which officially are 600Nm at 1600-4750rpm. I don’t know about you but I find this first rpm-number pretty impressive.. It is in fact so impressive that I adjusted my driving stile accordingly, using 70% of throttle rather than 100% most of the times when accelerating, because when doing this, the gearbox doesn’t kick down and lets you feel that nice big mountain of tourque, accompanied by a nice, civilized but audible rumble. I did prefer that to the (faster but more uncorfortable) way of revving the hell out of the engine.
Speaking of the gearbox, the CLS500 has the also pretty new 7G-Tronic automatic gearbox. The name might give you clue as to how many gears it possesses, in fact it has 7 gears, which means that (a) its official fuel consumption aren’t too bad (with the help of start stop and lots of other high tech) and (b) it does 260km/h (unfortunately this is what it’s electronically limited to) at 4500rpm, meaning the real live consumption won’t have you broke quite so fast either. Oh and I don’t really like auto gearboxes either but this one is pretty good as in it didn’t bother me. Also I think a big Merc wouldn’t work with a manual gearbox, that’s just not what these cars are.
Of course, the interior was nice. I’m not a car tester who drives big limos all the time so I can’t really compare it to anything, cause comparing it to our japanese tracktools is like comparing a grand hotel to a marshall’s post at a racetrack. Tell me I’m getting old but I’ve really grown fond of wafting big distances in these big Mercs in total comfort, seat massaging, warming or cooling you (several stages each), everyone moving out of the way as soon as they spot the big, LED-covered front in their rear-view mirror (I know how this sounds but that’s just how these cars make you feel!), listening to my tunes in total clarity through the 7-speaker Harman Kardon stereo no matter the speed.. I could go on. (A little admission here: I forgot to take a picture of the interior, so I had to borrow an official MB-picture.. you might be able to tell from the other pics that the one I had had a rather beige interior, which I thought was alright but I would’ve preferred the black version from the picture).
Also surprisingly useful is the vast array of driving aids the car has. Here again I have to say I’m not a fan of stuff like this at all, but in this car, they just make sense. Especially useful is the blind spot warning which is a little triangle in the rear view mirrors which lights up when something is in your blind spot. And there’s a loud beep should you indicate at this moment. I stopped turning my head when changing lanes pretty soon.
I won’t bore you with all the other systems, I guess if you care you could read a Mercedes brochure, but let me mention one thing that bothered me: why can’t you set the bloody Distronic Plus (radar guided cruise control, works really well too!) to more than 200km/h? Really spoiled my weekend. No the last bit was just a joke but this seriously was pretty much the only thing that bothered me.
OMG have I really written this much without saying a word about driving it? Well, I hope I haven’t bored you and in case you pressed Ctrl-F at the top of the page and entered „drive“, welcome back! Of course, the CLS500 is not a race car. Nor is it a sports car or anything. It’s simply a fast limo which is still surprisingly good fun to hustle along a back road. I had to adjust my entry speeds by a huge margin according to the scooby (no wonder, considering the CLS weighs a cool 600kg (!) more than the GC8) but it felt somehow cool driving this heavy thing fast. Odd but odd in a good way. At first, I didn’t really trust it because the steering doesn’t really tell you too much about what’s happening, but the weighting is actually pretty nice and after a while you learn to trust it and start throwing it around more than you thought would be possible.
Of course, being a Mercedes, it would rather let you drive it blindfolded while on fire than let you switch off the ESP completely, but not even this is set in stone. 😉 Thing is, going there lets you discover right away that this car doesn’t have a limited slip diff so I settled for leaving the ESP in its „official OFF“ position (which is more like „slightly OFF“) which allows a bit of slip angle and more wheelspin than I expected. At the end of the weekend I felt really confortable in it, entering turns quite slowly to then exit with a nice bit of angle, wheelspin and V8-warble.
Well that’s it for this week, I really hope you’ve enjoyed this slightly different take on a photo friday for once and if you really did or really didn’t, please feel free to tell me in the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Oh and don’t worry, I haven’t become a Benz-driving grandfather all of a sudden, I just find this totally different kind of car very interesting in its own way! But for good matter, the next photo friday will be back to old form with pics from a snow drift event I’ll be attending this coming weekend. In the scooby, not in a house on wheels!! 🙂
For once I’ve put the pics in 1600×900 wallpaper size on my website so download them there if you like them. And here is of course my facebook page for which I really fail to think of a good advertising slogan this time. 😉
Have a nice weekend!Well I recently had a few chances to drive something a bit different from the scooby I normally drive for a weekend. As one of the cars in question also happened to look pretty good (at least in my opinion) I of course had to do a little photoshoot. Being interested in pretty much anything with an internal combustion engine in it, it goes without saying that I also tested all its abilities pretty thouroughly so thinking about this week’s photo friday, I thought why not just have a go at a bit of a car review. So I present to you, the Mercedes-Benz CLS500:
Now, obviously, with you all being carnuts the reaction from 83% of you will be exactly that: „boooooh, it’s not even an AMG!!“. Well of course I would have taken the CLS63 if it had been possible, but let me tell you this much, the CLS500 isn’t too shabby either.
It doesn’t have a gazillion horsepower and carbon everything but it does have Mercedes‘ newest 4.7L V8 which, with the help of a pair of turbos, generates 408PS. This doesn’t make it a rocketship but it makes it a pretty capable autobahn stormer with plenty of grunt available at pretty much any rpm you wish. This makes sense when you look at the torque figures which officially are 600Nm at 1600-4750rpm. I don’t know about you but I find this first rpm-number pretty impressive.. It is in fact so impressive that I adjusted my driving stile accordingly, using 70% of throttle rather than 100% most of the times when accelerating, because when doing this, the gearbox doesn’t kick down and lets you feel that nice big mountain of tourque, accompanied by a nice, civilized but audible rumble. I did prefer that to the (faster but more uncorfortable) way of revving the hell out of the engine.
Speaking of the gearbox, the CLS500 has the also pretty new 7G-Tronic automatic gearbox. The name might give you clue as to how many gears it possesses, in fact it has 7 gears, which means that (a) its official fuel consumption aren’t too bad (with the help of start stop and lots of other high tech) and (b) it does 260km/h (unfortunately this is what it’s electronically limited to) at 4500rpm, meaning the real live consumption won’t have you broke quite so fast either. Oh and I don’t really like auto gearboxes either but this one is pretty good as in it didn’t bother me. Also I think a big Merc wouldn’t work with a manual gearbox, that’s just not what these cars are.
Of course, the interior was nice. I’m not a car tester who drives big limos all the time so I can’t really compare it to anything, cause comparing it to our japanese tracktools is like comparing a grand hotel to a marshall’s post at a racetrack. Tell me I’m getting old but I’ve really grown fond of wafting big distances in these big Mercs in total comfort, seat massaging, warming or cooling you (several stages each), everyone moving out of the way as soon as they spot the big, LED-covered front in their rear-view mirror (I know how this sounds but that’s just how these cars make you feel!), listening to my tunes in total clarity through the 7-speaker Harman Kardon stereo no matter the speed.. I could go on. (A little admission here: I forgot to take a picture of the interior, so I had to borrow an official MB-picture.. you might be able to tell from the other pics that the one I had had a rather beige interior, which I thought was alright but I would’ve preferred the black version from the picture).
Also surprisingly useful is the vast array of driving aids the car has. Here again I have to say I’m not a fan of stuff like this at all, but in this car, they just make sense. Especially useful is the blind spot warning which is a little triangle in the rear view mirrors which lights up when something is in your blind spot. And there’s a loud beep should you indicate at this moment. I stopped turning my head when changing lanes pretty soon.
I won’t bore you with all the other systems, I guess if you care you could read a Mercedes brochure, but let me mention one thing that bothered me: why can’t you set the bloody Distronic Plus (radar guided cruise control, works really well too!) to more than 200km/h? Really spoiled my weekend. No the last bit was just a joke but this seriously was pretty much the only thing that bothered me.
OMG have I really written this much without saying a word about driving it? Well, I hope I haven’t bored you and in case you pressed Ctrl-F at the top of the page and entered „drive“, welcome back! Of course, the CLS500 is not a race car. Nor is it a sports car or anything. It’s simply a fast limo which is still surprisingly good fun to hustle along a back road. I had to adjust my entry speeds by a huge margin according to the scooby (no wonder, considering the CLS weighs a cool 600kg (!) more than the GC8) but it felt somehow cool driving this heavy thing fast. Odd but odd in a good way. At first, I didn’t really trust it because the steering doesn’t really tell you too much about what’s happening, but the weighting is actually pretty nice and after a while you learn to trust it and start throwing it around more than you thought would be possible.
Of course, being a Mercedes, it would rather let you drive it blindfolded while on fire than let you switch off the ESP completely, but not even this is set in stone. 😉 Thing is, going there lets you discover right away that this car doesn’t have a limited slip diff so I settled for leaving the ESP in its „official OFF“ position (which is more like „slightly OFF“) which allows a bit of slip angle and more wheelspin than I expected. At the end of the weekend I felt really confortable in it, entering turns quite slowly to then exit with a nice bit of angle, wheelspin and V8-warble.
Well that’s it for this week, I really hope you’ve enjoyed this slightly different take on a photo friday for once and if you really did or really didn’t, please feel free to tell me in the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Oh and don’t worry, I haven’t become a Benz-driving grandfather all of a sudden, I just find this totally different kind of car very interesting in its own way! But for good matter, the next photo friday will be back to old form with pics from a snow drift event I’ll be attending this coming weekend. In the scooby, not in a house on wheels!! 🙂
For once I’ve put the pics in 1600×900 wallpaper size on my website so download them there if you like them. And here is of course my facebook page for which I really fail to think of a good advertising slogan this time. 😉
Have a nice weekend!