Features

Previously in Top Gear magazine, I have defined luxury - correctly, I reckon - as the reassuring excess of everything: space, money, food, logs for the fire, and so on. A luxury car is therefore pretty easy to identify.

Actually, it's always been easy to name. It's the Mercedes S-Class. Other cars may be plusher and built from more exotic materials; they may be available with gold badges and other 'luxury lifestyle' tinsel; but the S-Class has always been a pioneer of luxury as we understand it - that is, automotively speaking.

We'll start with space, since achieving real comfort is impossible without it (ask a camper), and the S-Class is the biggest car in the Mercedes chain. There's plenty of it, and it's all found in a car that still manages to look modestly proportioned.

The cabin can warm, cool and massage you in places were other car makers haven't yet identified. It's better than a health farm as an antidote to stress, and probably cheaper in the long run.

So far so obvious, but then you have the equipment. There's definitely an excess of that, as always, but now it's easier to use via the good offices of a truly intuitive one-knob-does-all COMAND system.

That's comforting. Devices such as the radar-based parking system with its camera and moving guides are luxury items, since they save on labour, like a washing machine.

New safety features too, must be a luxury - maybe even the new frontier of luxury. Distronic Plus intelligent cruise control allows you to relax in traffic, since the car will stop and start itself.

The infra-red headlamps and head-up vision system will save your eyes from strain in fog or rain, and the LED brake lights, which flash under hard stopping to warn the bloke behind, offer genuine peace of mind of a sort that the extended warranty on a Dixons camera tries so hard to convey.

Bloody hell, this is a car that even thinks it knows when you're going to crash, and takes some of the tiresome effort of adopting the brace position away from the occupants.

The seats do that for you, and Brake Assist Plus will recognise, before you have even had to bother yourself with it, when a bit more stopping power is needed.