2019 Mercedes-Benz CL550 Review: 2019 Mercedes-Benz CL550

2019 Mercedes-Benz CL550 Review: 2019 Mercedes-Benz CL550

The 2007 Mercedes-Benz CL550 is a beautiful car both inside and out. With its curvaceous profile, bold front nose, pronounced fenders, and flared rear wheel arches, it boasts some of the most elegantly beaten sheet metal on the road. From the inside, the view is arguably even better--especially with the windows down, as the lack of a B pillar gives the CL550 an open-air feel. A sumptuously appointed cabin combines leather and wood-trimmed refinement with some of the best in-car gadgetry we've seen, including some very well-equipped seats. 100,000 super coupe one of the safest cars on the road. To devise practical tests for all of the tech features on the 2007 Mercedes-Benz CL550 would take us a lot longer than the week that we were given to spend with the car. In addition to being a consummate piece of German engineering and a stylish, pillarless coupe, the CL550 is also a giant computer on wheels, with more technology toys than the average home.

Thus spoiled for choice, we chose for our test the most unique technology feature on the car: its infrared Night View Assist monitor, designed to help give the driver a better idea of obstacles in the road after dark. Night View Assist use beams of infrared light from projectors in the car's headlights to illuminate as much as 500 feet of the road ahead. We set up an obstacle course to navigate using the CL550's Night View Assist feature. To set ourselves a sufficiently challenging test, we constructed a slalom course from some boxes we had laying around the office. The idea was that we would try to drive the entire course without taking our eyes from the Night View Assist screen. In this way, we would get a good idea of the screen's usefulness for negotiating the road as well as its ability to illuminate potential hazards. 110,000 car in the middle of an abandoned lot), the first thing we noticed when looking at the Night View Assist monitor was that we could see only four of them, albeit with impressive clarity.

Due to the angle of the infrared camera, the view of the road on the screen does not include whatever is within the first 15 to 20 feet of the front bumper. This did not bode well for our slalom test. The infrared camera provides a crisp image of the road ahead, but it can't detect objects that are close to the front bumper. We soldiered on, however, and proceeded to try to drive the course using only the evidence of the screen. As we couldn't see the boxes as we approached them, this proved to be extremely difficult, and in the end, we were not able to negotiate the course without the aid of our peripheral vision. That would usually be enough seat technology to score high points, but on the CL550 there is far more in store. A button to the right of the center console opens up a whole menu dedicated to programming the CL550's dynamic multicontour front seats.

Similar to those we saw in the 2006 BMW M5, the CL550 has the option of dynamic seats, which use active side bolsters to physically resist lateral movement of the driver and front passenger in their seats while in cornering. Rather than the pivoting side supports in the BMWs, the CL550 makes use of pneumatic chambers, which inflate to correspond inversely to steering movements (a left-hand turn will cause the right-hand chamber to inflate, and vice versa). The dynamic seats can be set to one of two levels, depending on how spiritedly you are planning to drive, or they can be turned off. Having had our kidneys pummeled by the active bolstering through a particularly winding section of Northern California coastal roads, we were overjoyed to discover the final party trick of the active seats: a Pulse mode massage feature. The Pulse function on the Mercedes CL550's seats gave us plenty of relaxing drive time. It should be clear by now that the CL550 was designed with comfort and convenience as a primary focus, a fact that is apparent in every aspect of the cabin layout.