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m e rce d es - be nz s 500l
Sublime Class Is the Mercedes S500L - endowed with a sublime petrol V8, new styling and enhanced comfort - the ultimate in automotive craft?
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OD Rating Price Rs 95,80,000 ex-showroom Mumbai
+ Space + Pace + Class + Features - Price
Words Bertrand D’souza Photography Mohd Nasir
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here’s a new trend emerging in the super luxury car segment in India, a trend that has its roots in the European car market. It involves the acquisition of a car that none of your peers possess, ensuring the owner an air of exclusivity. So, for a person for whom a crore of rupees is chicken feed, does it really matter which S-Class he buys? Take for instance the new S500L, which costs only a few lakh rupees more than the S350. Which leads us to think that Mercedes would have done better to offer just one variant. An S-Class is after all an SClass, the Blue Seal of luxury, comfort and distinction. But like I mentioned, there is a large group of people in India who want the letters on the rear of their S-Class to read S500L, not 350. To them it does matter that
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their S-Class is more powerful and also more expensive than what their peers own. So what does the S500L bring to the table?
STYLE AND BUILD The S500L has the new 2010 styling package to bring it in line with the rest of the Mercedes-Benz range and takes cues from the new E-Class. This in fact is the new design language being spoken at Mercedes-Benz, until an all-new S-Class comes out in the future. This however is quite an impressive design language, mellifluous and sweet and it does add some freshness to the S-Class. The W221 form first disclosed in 2005 though is inherently quite impressive and even four years later with some minor detail
additions is still as elegant as ever. The minor modifications involve a modified bumper and a sharper arrow-shaped grille, neither of which make it look better or worse than the original form. Only minute observation will show that the honeycomb grille on the air dam is subtly different from the older car’s and that a chrome strip runs along the length of the car accentuating its sportiness. However a new light package which uses an LED array for driving lamps under the headlamps and a strip of LEDs in a straight line on the side pods of the lower bumper give it an absolutely divine persona. An LED array is also used in the tail lamps and though I am not a big fan of the original shape and design, I must admit the LEDs do improve them. The wing mirrors are also of a new design type with swooping indicator clusters embedded