Mercedes Benz S550 Specs

So the story here is one largely of numbers. Let’s start with 18 miles. That’s the distance from the historic gold-mining town of Auburn, California to Foothill Farms, a census-designated place outside Sacramento. That’s also the distance the S-class carried us at 70 mph, using solely electric power, while steering itself. Our only intervention was to touch the steering wheel every 10 to 15 seconds to make sure the large sedan continued its autonomous, electrified undertaking. We should, however, qualify that accomplishment by noting that those 18 miles saw roughly a 1000-foot drop in elevation. As always, your mileage may vary, but if you have a 10-mile commute to work and a plug at the office, the S550e’s 8.7-kWh battery pack could put you, the VP of finance, on a carbon-footprint par with those quinoa-snorting Tesla drivers over in engineering.

With its turbocharged six-cylinder plus electric motor, the S550e is not exactly a Model S P85D. Still, a 13.6-second quarter-mile at 103 mph puts the plug-in only 0.2 second behind its lighter, twin-turbo V-8–powered sibling. On the drag strip, we found that the abrupt hit of power from the electric motor made it hard to launch, although it was a tad quicker than the standard S550 off the line and recorded an identical 60-mph sprint of 4.9 seconds. In our lateral-acceleration testing, the plug-in suffered mightily against the V-8 car, posting a mere 0.81 g to the regular 550’s 0.87. Sure, the 482-pound weight penalty hurts, but we’d lay blame at the feet of the Michelin Primacy MXM4 all-season tires. Compared with the Goodyear Eagle F1 Asymmetric 2 summer rubber on the S550 we tested, the hybrid gives up a big chunk of grip.

Which brings us to the one major luxury bugaboo with this S-class hybrid. Picture yourself in the Savile Row suit of a London banker who works in the city’s congestion zone. As a man of means, you’ve purchased an S550e to be chauffeured to work in, while neatly avoiding the onerous fossil-fuel fees imposed upon you by city officials, thanks to the car’s ability to run solely on electric power. But every time your man Stanislav attempts to modulate the brakes to bring the car to a jerk-free stop, he fails.