Mercedes-Benz S-Class S500 4Matic - long-term review

The S500 has an 84-litre fuel tank, a cavernous receptacle whose existence made me ponder the wisdom of this particular Lifer. Would I need to take out a mortgage every time I filled up?

To begin with, we rarely breached the psychologically important £100 threshold – unless I was going super unleaded, which I do from time to time – and hyper-miling the S has become quite addictive. This car encourages mindfulness despite its plutocratic image, as I’ve previously noted. Consequently, I’ve seen 35mpg and a range of almost 600 miles from one tank, which is seriously impressive for such a big car. Better than many smaller, supposedly more efficient cross-overs, in fact.

Obviously things have changed somewhat, in light of Putin’s morally repugnant military adventure in Ukraine. I’ve travelled extensively in the region, and it’s impossible not to feel despair and disbelief. My thoughts are primarily with the Ukrainians, but think also about the pro-democracy citizens of Russia who now face 15 years in prison for protesting against the war, and the Belarussians who recently defied their ludicrous ‘leader’, Alexander Lukashenko. It’s difficult to believe this is happening in Europe in 2022.

The west’s dependence on Russian energy and its despicable courting of the country’s corrupt oligarchy has brought us all to a moment of reckoning. There are other factors at work, of course, and like everyone else I marvel at how rapidly prices at the pump rise when the cost of a barrel of Brent crude oil spikes, and how slowly that comes down again when the pressure eases. Frankly, it’s a joke, although fuelling a Mercedes S-Class is the very definition of a first world problem given what’s going on.

But it also focuses the mind. Someone tweeted me asking whether a 56mph speed limit should be mandatory. It’s an echo of what happened during 1973’s Energy Crisis, an event that amongst other things killed off America’s grotesque reliance on outsized cars.

Meanwhile, some activists have taken to letting the air out of SUV tyres, an act that borders on criminal damage but that’s designed to provoke serious thought. Gigantic geo-political unrest on one side, climate change on the other.

What odds would you get on internal combustion becoming socially unacceptable within the next decade?