Mercedes-Benz GLS review: can it topple the Range Rover as the S-Class of SUVs?
The trouble with making the best car in the world is that you become a target for everyone else obsessed with doing better. The Mercedes-Benz S-Class is a wondrous machine whose chauffeurs, so often seen parked up in London watching the in-car TV, should count themselves very lucky indeed. But they’d be luckier still in a Range Rover, argues Land Rover. Our Bentayga betters it, says Bentley.
These days, SUVs are where it’s at, and saloons are out. The S-Class will still be overlooked by some simply because it’s not an SUV. You don’t climb up into its lavish, plentiful space. You don’t look down upon the hoi polloi from it. The Range Rover may not quite be as complete as an S-Class. But it is an SUV.
So Mercedes-Benz has had a rethink. It’s facelifted the previously-anonymous GL, with a fancier nose and much posher-feeling interior. It’s more luxurious to drive and the engines are better. Crucially, it’s been renamed: out goes boring old GL, in comes exotic-sounding GLS. Yes, the S-Class of SUVs.
I went to Austria to try it out. Places like this are where, goes the marketers’ idealist thinking, fully ski-loaded GLSs will be pointed every winter. They are conditions a Range Rover aces and, as I soon found out, the four-wheel drive Merc also shrugs off with snow-capped coolness. It’s incomprehensibly grippy and secure on icy roads, so much so the entire family will get out and topple over because the ground beneath its wheels is way, way more slippery than they would ever believe.
It does all this in multi-climate-controlled comfort, with ultra-low noise levels ensuring the studio-sound audio isn’t spoiled, and a significant uplift in appearance and quality over the old GL fully deserving the S-Class badge: the old model was just too ‘posh company car’ for this price point.
Crucially, it has seven seats across three rows. Take that, Range Rover and Bentley. You may never use them but their very presence means the interior is massively voluminous, and it’s terrific for your social profile when you can pack in two more of the new people you’ve just met on the ski slope. Friends for life thanks to the GLS.
But with the best will in the world, we can’t spend all our lives skiing. Owners will eventually have to bring the casual conversation references to owning ‘the S-Class of SUVs’ back home. And once there, they’ll be reminded that, wow, this thing is big. It’s 5.1 metres long, nearly two metres wide, a stonking 1.8 metres tall. You’ll tower over the S-Class whose styling the GLS shares; a Range Rover isn’t the only inner-city behemoth.
For this reason, make two choices. One, go for the GLS 350d diesel engine, rather than the rorty £102,000 AMG. It’s fully laden with exhaust-cleansing tech so won’t be thrown out of London any time soon, and the extra muscle it has from low revs makes shifting this 2.5-tonne monster rather easier (it’s helped by a brilliant nine-speed automatic. Yes, nine).
Second, tell the dealer you want the Active Curve System. Active suspension, if you will: it stops it rolling around corners, uncannily so, and gives this massive car a fingertip precision that will amaze you first time out (even if it can’t help you find a parking bay big enough at journey’s end).
Most of all, don’t dwell too much in the showroom checking out the S-Class alongside the GLS: you’ll discover the trad saloon still has the fancier interior, more space-age tech, near-ridiculous rear seat comfort that brings an Emirates-like experience to the North Circular. The GLS ultimately isn’t the S-Class of SUVs. That’s still the Range Rover. But it’s a classy vehicle all the same.
Richard Aucock works for www.motoringresearch.com