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First Drive: The 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS450+ Is A Beautiful Electric Porpoise

I Don’t Know What To Do With All This Tech

My husband used to be a sales associate at a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Montreal, and he’s spent the entire duration of our marriage telling me that no automaker is as luxuriously high-tech as Mercedes. I have never discounted this observation. I’ve just also never felt the need to drive an extremely tech-heavy car. I still have a hard time dealing with a tiny infotainment screen.

So I think it’s probably a little bit of an understatement to say that the EQS’s offerings are a bit overwhelming. After I laughed out loud at the exterior, I also laughed out loud at the absolutely massive Hyperscreen. I wanted to ask it if it was compensating for something. I wanted to ask why such a cute fella needs such a big screen.

Functionally, the Hyperscreen is great. A single piece of curved glass, it’s a gorgeous feat of technological innovation that works with rapid speed due to an eight-core processor and 24 gigabytes of RAM. You tap on anything, and there’s not going to be lag. You’re immediately transported to the place you chose to go in the infotainment system.

The graphics are also gorgeous, but again, it’s a little bit Much. There’s a screen for the driver, one of the passenger, and a tall screen in the center, and in those latter two, you can access everything from radio controls to vehicle settings to satellite maps to photo galleries to video games. I did poke around the Tetris game and found it took a while to load but was otherwise fun. I still can’t imagine myself using an infotainment screen instead of my phone for gaming, though.

Even worse, you still get a lot of glare, despite the fact that Mercedes tried its best to avoid that. There’s not really anything you’re going to be able to do about the reflection of the sun when it’s especially bright.

You can also navigate with conversational commands after saying, “Hey Mercedes.” As in, you can say something like, “Hey Mercedes, I want coffee,” and your car will find you the nearest coffee spots. I used to hate voice commands because it was next to impossible to actually get what you were asking for, but this modern iteration that you see on luxury cars has really changed the game. I don’t have to think up the robotic command I’d need to change the radio station. I can just say it.

The digital dashboard was also one hell of a feature. You can cycle through tons of different displays, most of which are just mind boggling. You can literally have your navigation map displayed on your dashboard — and I don’t mean you get a little box that has navigation. The whole screen turns into a map. I’m sure some folks will enjoy it, but it was massively overwhelming for me.

As was the augmented reality navigation, which feels a little bit more video game-y than anything else. Maybe I’m just too old to appreciate these things.

The Verdict

It’s difficult to offer a verdict for a car that I can’t compare to the other vehicles in its class, I can say that the 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS450+ is a delightful vehicle that transforms much of what makes Mercedes special into a flagship luxury sedan — but it does feel like the German automaker couldn’t decide what it wanted to do. It tried to combine modern austerity with Benz’s traditional elegance, and it works… but it’s probably not going to work for everyone. It didn’t work for me, but it could very well work for you. And you know what? I respect a delightfully polarizing car.

Best Of 2021: In Epically Nerdy Interview, Elon Musk Discusses Build Quality Problems With Engineer Who Compared Model 3 To ‘A Kia In The ’90s’

Tesla’s CEO then fesses up to his company’s build-related mistakes and dives into why they’ve been happening. When asked about panel gaps, Musk says: “It took [Tesla] a while to…iron out the production process,” going on to discuss how the company struggled to get details right while production was in “vertical climb mode.” Really early production cars, and the cars that come out after production has leveled off, Musk says, are the ones likely to have the best fit and finish.

Munro, having met with a number of Tesla owners during a recent road trip, noticed variations between two vehicles built in the same short time-span. Confused as to how this could happen, he asked Musk. “We actually did improve gap and paint quality quite a bit towards the end of last year,” the California-based engineer-CEO told the Michigan-based engineer-CEO, “Even in the course of December.”

Musk also mentions that while ramping up production, his team rushed cars in a way that didn’t adequately allow paint to dry, causing issues with quality. “Production is hell,” Musk puts it frankly.

What about the rear part of the Model 3’s body, which Munro criticized for consisting of far too many pieces with far too many different fastening methods? (shown below):

Image for article titled Best Of 2021: In Epically Nerdy Interview, Elon Musk Discusses Build Quality Problems With Engineer Who Compared Model 3 To 'A Kia In The '90s'

The image above shows this problem on an early Model 3 build, though Munro’s 2021 model does show some improvement. For example, there are now 17 spot welds on one particular plate instead of 26 on the old car, and there’s one fewer bolt. Oddly, though, even newer Model 3s don’t share the Model Y’s more intuitive “mega-casting” rear wheelhouse — i.e. a single piece instead of various panels fastened together.

Musk discusses this Model 3 design weakness.

“The organizational structure errors, they manifest themselves in the product,” he begins. “We’ve got probably the best material science team in the world at Tesla. Engineers would ask what’s the best material for this purpose…and they got like 50 different answers. And they’re all true individually, but they were not true collectively,” he admits.

“When you try to join all these dissimilar alloys…you’ve got gaps that you’ve got to seal, and you’ve got to join these things, and some of them need to be joined with rivets, some of them need to be joined with spot welds, some of them need to be joined with resin or resin and spot welds,” he continues.

“Frankly, it looks like a bit of a Frankenstein situation when you look at it all together.” Musk then talks about how sealing the gaps between the different pieces in the body is a nightmare. “That might be the most painful job in the factory, is spackling on the sealant,” he describes, mentioning how even a small error can cause leaks and NVH problems.

Munro asks why newer Model 3s still make use of such a multipiece rear body design instead of a single casting like on the Model Y. “It’s hard to change the wheels on the bus when it’s going 80 mph down the highway,” Musk responds, saying the Model 3 represents such a large portion of the automaker’s volume that the company “[needs] an opportunity to redo the factory without blowing up the cashflow.”

He talks about how important going to a single-piece casting was for the Model Y: There are no gaps, there’s no sealant and there’s no risk of galvanic corrosion at the interface of dissimilar metals. That choice alone, Musks says, allowed Tesla to reduce its body shop size by 30 percent. “We got rid of 300 robots just with that rear body casting,” he tells Munro.

Musk then discusses with Munro the plans for Tesla to move to a structural battery pack that leverages the individual cells as structural elements that resist shear forces. “The cells today in every car are carried like a sack of potatoes,” Musk explains. “They actually have negative structural value,” going on to say how today, cells don’t make vehicles any more rigid, and that especially because there is isolation material needed between the cells themselves and the pack housing to help the batteries handle shock loads, batteries are just a liability from a mass standpoint. Musk wants to change that, and get dual use from those batteries.

The rest of the interview remains thoroughly nerdy. There’s discussion about cars’ natural frequencies, about how reducing polar moment of inertia by bringing mass toward the car’s center of mass yields better handling. There’s discussion about tolerance stack-up and how that leads Tesla to almost always err toward fewer pieces and Lego-like parts precision.

Munro mentions his company’s BMW i3 findings, lauding the German automaker’s excellent build quality for the carbon-fiber body. Musk replies that one of his major concerns about use of carbon fiber is that it has a vastly different coefficient of thermal expansion than aluminum or steel, and this can cause fitment issues when the vehicle is subjected to certain thermal environments.

Musk also talks about how Tesla’s casting sizes on the Model S and X were limited because heat treatment led to shape distortion once the part reached a certain size. To facilitate larger castings, Musk states, company’s material scientists had to make a custom alloy that didn’t require an additional treating step after casting.

Musk also mentions that he wants to do away with 12-volt systems on EVs — a holdover from earlier designs and a way to easily integrate already-existing components from prominent auto suppliers. A 48-volt system, Musk and Munro agree, could have lots of benefits including reduced wire size and weight. Musk mentions that the S and X are now getting lithium-ion 12-volt batteries, which add capacity and last longer than traditional lead-acid ones.

The discussion concludes with talk about the future of EVs and the speed with which they will enter the marketplace in coming years. There’s also talk about shortsellers because of course there is.

Throughout the interview, especially in the beginning, Munro compliments Tesla’s excellent seats, with Musk talking about how the key is to reduce pressure peaks on the body. The two enginerds examine the value of making seats in-house versus buying them from suppliers.

It’s all nerdy and fascinating, and in some ways, a truly magical moment between two total math and science geeks. I love it. I also love how, when Munro says he was having issues with Tesla’s Autopilot driver-assistance system because of bad road markings in Texas, Musk straight-up says: “Even if the road is painted completely wrong and a UFO lands in the middle of the road, the car still cannot crash and still needs to do the right thing…It can’t be dependent upon the road markings being correct….It’s just gotta be ‘no matter what, it’s not gonna crash.’”

The whole interview is just gold. I talked with Munro & Associate’s president Cory Steuben, and he told me about how this interview even came to be. Steuben and Munro are in the middle of a road trip right now in a Model 3 that they spontaneously decided to purchase.

The two planned a trip out west to see some EV automakers, and hung out in Fremont to see if Musk would be there. He wasn’t. Serendipitously, Steuben received an email from an individual saying he could set up an interview with Musk. Musk’s assistant, at 11 p.m. on Monday, scheduled an interview in Boca Chica, Texas for Friday, but by that time, Steuben and Munro were in Eugene, Oregon.

So Steuben and Munro had to bee-line it 2,500 miles, 40 hours in the Model 3, planning charging stations and really putting electromobility to the ultimate test in driving from Oregon all the way to Texas to see the king of EVs himself, Elon Musk.

Luckily, Steuben and Munro made their meeting, with the former saying the billionaire came off as “one of the most enjoyable, humble, stoic…people that I’ve met who’s in a position like that.”

Musk, Steuben said, spent three hours with the two engineers from Michigan, and was seen working at 10:30 p.m. on a Friday.

As if the interview weren’t epic enough on its own.

At $16,500, Is This 1965 Citroën 2CV Beaucoup Cute?

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The Most Confusing Turn Signals In The Auto Industry Are Probably Here To Stay

The Mini Cooper’s Confusing Taillights Are Likely Here to Stay

When BMW brought Mini back in the early 2000s, the taillights on Frank Stephenson’s original design were triangular. They later filled out and got a bit more squarish, and have remained so for about a decade — but that looks to change starting next year. The upper and lower inner chunks of the clusters have been chipped away, making sideways trapezoids.

The entire unit has been subdivided into what I could only describe as pixels, but like pixels from an old-school LCD display. If I squint, it seems like the bars that would comprise the Union Jack are a bit lighter than the rest, and I bet those light up in similar fashion as the current Mini’s taillights.

Image for article titled The Most Confusing Turn Signals In The Auto Industry Are Probably Here To Stay

This would be a very smart move for Mini, because it’s getting so much attention over the flag lights from nerds like us. I’m willing to bet every person that directly follows a new Mini has noticed the design, and so long as they’ve ever seen 15 seconds of Austin Powers, they probably get the joke.

I have less to say about the rest of the upcoming Mini’s look. I mean, I’m still reminded of goatees or that one episode of The Powerpuff Girls when I study the front, and the headlights have these crossbars on their upper and lower portions that almost look like eyelids on a Family Guy character. I’m overflowing with cartoon character references.

There’s more to say about the interior, where Mini designers have seemingly ditched the small pill-shaped digital instrument cluster behind the steering wheel in favor of a heads-up display. The dash is entirely clad in what looks to be canvas, with a big old circular panel affixed to the center dash. It’s like the essence of a Mini interior stripped down to its most iconographic parts, and it’s kind of soulless. I don’t love it coming from the current Mini’s fun and lighthearted cabin.

Supposedly this new Mini Cooper will be available in internal combustion and battery electric forms. If the manufacturer can squeeze roughly 50 more miles out of the SE while keeping the price around where it sits today — and the driving dynamics on point — it’ll be a pretty compelling bargain EV.

Tesla’s Latest FSD Beta Doesn’t Seem Ready For Public Use, Which Raises Big Questions

What I like about this test is that it presents a very good mix of everyday, normal driving situations in an environment with a good mix of traffic density, road complexity, lighting conditions, road markings, and more. In short, reality, the same sort of entropy-heavy reality all of us live in and where we expect our machines to work.

There’s a lot that FSD does that’s impressive when you consider that this is an inert mass of steel and rubber and silicon that’s effectively driving on its own through a crowded city. We’ve come a long way since Stanley the Toureg finished the DARPA Challenge back in 2006, and there’s so much to be impressed by.

At the same time, this FSD beta proves to be a pretty shitty driver, at least in this extensive test session.

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Anyone arguing that FSD in its latest state drives better than a human is either delusional, high from the fumes of their own raw ardor for Elon Musk or needs to find better-driving humans to hang out with.

FSD drives in a confusing, indecisive way, making all kinds of peculiar snap decisions and generally being hard to read and predict to other drivers around them. Which is a real problem.

Drivers expect a certain baseline of behaviors and reactions from the cars around them. That means there’s not much that’s more dangerous to surrounding traffic than an unpredictable driver, which this machine very much is.

And that’s when it’s driving at least somewhat legally; there are several occasions in this video where traffic laws were actually broken, including two instances of the car attempting to drive the wrong way down a street and into oncoming traffic.

Nope, not great.

In the comments, many people have criticized Kyle, the driver/supervisor, for allowing the car to make terrible driving decisions instead of intervening. The reasoning for this ranges from simple Tesla-fan-rage to the need for disengagements to help the system learn, to concern that by not correcting the mistakes, Kyle is potentially putting people in danger.

They’re also noting that the software is very clearly unfinished and in a beta state, which, is pretty clearly true as well.

These are all reasonable points. Well, the people just knee-jerk shielding Elon’s Works from any scrutiny aren’t reasonable, but the other points are, and they bring up bigger issues.

Specifically, there’s the fundamental question about whether or not it makes sense to test an unfinished self-driving system on public roads, surrounded by people, in or out of other vehicles, that did not agree to participate in any sort of beta testing of any kind.

You could argue that a student driver is a human equivalent of beta testing our brain’s driving software, though when this is done in any official capacity, there’s a professional driving instructor in the car, sometimes with an auxiliary brake pedal, and the car is often marked with a big STUDENT DRIVER warning.

Image for article titled Tesla's Latest FSD Beta Doesn't Seem Ready For Public Use, Which Raises Big Questions — Image: JDT/Tesla/YouTUbe

I’ve proposed the idea of some kind of warning lamp for cars under machine control, and I still think that’s not a bad idea, especially during the transition era we find ourselves in.

Of course, in many states, you can teach your kid to drive on your own without any special permits. That context is quite similar to FSD beta drivers since they don’t have any special training beyond a regular driver’s license (and no, Tesla’s silly Safety Score does not count as special training).

In both cases, you’re dealing with an unsure driver who may not make good decisions, and you may need to take over at a moment’s notice. On an FSD-equipped Tesla (or really any L2-equipped car), taking over should be easy, in that your hands and other limbs should be in position on the car’s controls, ready to take over.

In the case of driving with a kid, this is less easy, though still possible. I know because I was once teaching a girlfriend of the time how to drive and had to take control of a manual old Beetle from the passenger seat. You can do it, but I don’t recommend it.

Of course, when you’re teaching an uncertain human, you’re always very, very aware of the situation and nothing about it would give you a sense of false confidence that could allow your attention to waver. This is a huge problem with Level 2 semi-automated systems, though, and one I’ve discussed at length before.

As far as whether or not the FSB beta needs driver intervention to “learn” about all the dumb things it did wrong, I’m not entirely sure this is true. Tesla has mentioned the ability to learn in “shadow mode” which would eliminate the need for FSD to be active to learn driving behaviors by example.

As far as Kyle’s willingness to let FSD beta make its bad decisions, sure, there are safety risks, but it’s also valuable to see what it does to give an accurate sense of just what the system is capable of. He always stepped in before things got too bad, but I absolutely get that this in no way represents safe driving.

At the same time, showing where the system fails helps users of FSD have a better sense of the capabilities of what they’re using so they can attempt to understand how vigilant they must be.

This is all really tricky, and I’m not sure yet of the best practice solution here.

This also brings up the question of whether Tesla’s goals make sense in regard to what’s known as their Operational Design Domain (ODD), which is just a fancy way of saying “where should I use this?”

Tesla has no restrictions on their ODD, as referenced in this tweet:

This raises a really good point: should Tesla define some sort of ODD?

I get that their end goal is Level 5 full, anywhere, anytime autonomy, a goal that I think is kind of absurd. Full Level 5 is decades and decades away. If Tesla freaks are going to accuse me of literally having blood on my hands for allegedly delaying, somehow, the progress of autonomous driving, then you’d think the smartest move would be to restrict the ODD to areas where the system is known to work better (highways, etc) to allow for more automated deployment sooner.

That would make the goal more Level 4 than 5, but the result would be, hopefully, safer automated vehicle operation, and, eventually, safer driving for everyone.

Trying to make an automated vehicle work everywhere in any condition is an absolutely monumental task, and there’s still so so much work to do. Level 5 systems are probably decades away, at best. Restricted ODD systems may be able to be deployed much sooner, and maybe Tesla should be considering doing that, just like many other AV companies (Waymo, Argo, and so on) are doing.

We’re still in a very early transition period on this path to autonomy, however that turns out. Videos like these, that show real-world behavior of such systems, problems and all, are very valuable, even if we’re still not sure on the ethics of making them.

All I know is that now is the time to question everything, so don’t get bullied by anyone.

At $30,900, Is This 2006 BMW Z4 M Coupe With Modest Mileage A Marvelous Deal?

At $30,900, Is This Low Mileage ’06 BMW Z4 M Coupe A Good Deal?

Seattle, Washington, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.

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Something About Tesla’s Model S Plaid Nürburgring Run Doesn’t Sit Right

Musk May Have Lied About Modifications For The Plaid’s Ring Run

Twitter user @Benshooter later walked back the accusation of Musk lying about the record. Tesla posted onboard video to its own YouTube channel of the record run, and it appears that the only modification made was to put an aftermarket digital gauge readout in front of the driver, even retaining the stock yoke steering wheel. The video was also posted to The ‘Ring’s YouTube channel, corroborating the authenticity of the record. The official lap time for this onboard video is 7:35.579.

So what gives? What’s with the other time listed, a 7:30.909? Clearly Tesla has more speed up its sleeve. Judging by the onboard video being set in a red car, it appears Tesla may have had two red cars on hand, one stock and one seriously modified. There was also at least one black car on hand as well. Maybe Tesla ran several iterations of the Plaid at the track, including some future track-focused version with carbon ceramic brakes and a round steering wheel.

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With the results having been certified as a record by the necessary officials, Tesla seems to have gone through the motions of getting this done the right way. There’s no reason not to be a little skeptical of Elon Musk claims, but at least this time it appears that everything is on the up and up. It’s a little sketchy that Elon didn’t explain the actual “record” was the slower of the two lap times he posted on Twitter, but it’s entirely possible he doesn’t know the difference.

At $36,000, Could This Low-Mileage 2005 Chevy SSR Pick Up Your Spirits?

At $36,000, Could This 2005 Chevy SSR Pickup Your Spirits?

Hemmings Classifieds out of West Chester, Pennsylvania, or go here if the ad disappears.

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At $13,500, Could You See This 1979 Ford Fairmont Futura In Your Future?

At $13,500, Could This 1979 Ford Futura Be In Your Future?

Los Angeles, California, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.

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The Bentley Continental GT3 Shows How Much Work Goes Into Climbing Pikes Peak

Bentley’s Continental GT3 Pikes Peak did pretty well at this year’s Hill Climb, managing to come in second in Time Attack 1 and fourth place overall. The machine was the best performing among the renewably-powered cars. Bentley claims it did so well, its run would have been record-breaking — if not for the closures that stopped the cars from safely finishing the last third of the climb.

The Continental GT3 produced 850 horsepower at altitude, which would be something around 1100 HP at sea level. Getting that much power took a lot of collaboration between Bentley and its motorsport partners. Their work is broken down in a detailed report from Racecar Engineering (RE), who cite Bentley’s Technical manager of Motorsport Engineering, David Argent.

It’s clear in the report that Argent and Rhys Millen, the GT3’s driver at Pikes Peak, were competing not just with other race cars, but with the Peak itself:

Specifically, it’s the altitude that the GT3 was fighting as its 4.0-liter, twin-turbo V8 pushed up the mountain. Fans of the Pike Peak Hill Climb already know how the elevation affects the machines, but the report from RE explains how Bentley got its turbos to work efficiently at altitudes ranging from 9,390 to 14,115 feet.

Argent explained that it’s all about the turbo wastegate:

‘One of the first things we found out when we were out at the Pikes Peak is that the wastegate control we selected when we’re at sea level wouldn’t allow us to meet those boost targets even with the wastegates fully shut,’ notes Argent. ‘We did some optimisation to get the right size turbo housing to allow us to have the response and meet our boost targets. We had to go to an external wastegate because the internal wastegate wasn’t big enough to dump what we needed to control the boost.’ The ratio of compression from atmospheric pressure to turbo pressure is peaking at 3.7.

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Going from about 525 to 850 HP (at altitude) didn’t just need better airflow.

It also required a beefier fuel system, which the Continental GT3 got by adding port injection to its direct injection, according to Argent:

‘We sourced appropriate injectors and fuel rails. The injector size and flow were based on the power figure we want to achieve at the bottom of the run at 9,390 ft above sea level. We added port injection to work with the direct injection that already existed on the engine to achieve the volume of fuel we needed to generate the power we wanted and had to work out how we could achieve the power figure in controlling both injector types.

As if the altitude and power targets didn’t make things hard enough, the Bentley also ran on a renewable fuel.

The renewable fuel complicated things, a bit as the report detailed:

Bentley has been working with Esso’s renewable racing fuel for this project – a blend developed from bio content with an ethanol base equivalent to an E85. The characteristics of the fuel meant the engine required little work in calibration to operate on it, despite it being a more volatile mixture than the traditional race gasoline used in the GT3. There are no additives to the fuel blend to aid oxygenation of the combustion fluids to compensate for the reducing are density as the car climbs Pikes Peak.

With the increase of power and chaos in the fuel and air mixture, Bentley had to be careful to ensure that they didn’t reach the knock limits of the mix before the desired ignition timing.

Again, the team used bigger turbochargers to address the lack of air density and the fuel mixture, per the report:

‘We had to get more air into the engine to coincide with fuel, so we also went for bigger turbochargers with appropriately sized compressors and turbines,’ says Argent. ‘Consequently, we have turbos with a large compressor and a significantly small turbine to compress that less dense air and get the least turbo lag possible.

But I think the coolest part is Argent explaining how it’s not fully outright power that makes for the best car at Pikes Peak, because somewhere along the way all that power can become useless:

‘At a certain point, you will get traction limited,’ highlights Argent. ‘You can’t just stick a thousand horsepower and 1400 newtons to torque through a rear-wheel-drive because you won’t be able to use it. We looked at suggested figures from Rhys and some simple simulations with inside Bentley to suggest what power figures we should target.’

Getting as close to that intersection of usable power and traction — but not beyond — is what gets the car up the mountain faster. Bentley was happy enough with its performance, it hinted that it might be back for more next year.