Mercedes-Benz S-Class chauffeur hire

The long-wheelbase body puts the extra length where a passenger can use it, which is behind the front seats rather than under the bonnet. A tall adult sits with a hand’s width of air in front of their knees, and the rear seat reclines far enough that a two-hour leg is genuinely restful rather than merely tolerable.

Two people travel in what feel like separate armchairs; a third fits on the centre section for shorter runs. Rear climate is set from a panel in the armrest, blinds pull up on the side and rear glass, and there is enough room in the door bin for a bottle of water and a folded newspaper without either ending up on the floor.

The detail people mention afterwards is the door closing. It shuts with a single low sound rather than a clunk, which sets the tone for everything that follows, and the seat is high enough that getting out is a step rather than a climb.

The S-Class earns its keep on early arrivals. You have been awake for eighteen hours, the queue at the border took forty minutes, and the last thing you want is conversation. The seat reclines, the cabin is quiet enough to sleep in, and a chauffeur who has done the run before will not ask you a single question until you are on the M4.

The mechanics of the pickup are the same as any airport booking: the car is timed against the actual landing, the chauffeur waits inside the terminal with a board, and the luggage goes into the boot rather than onto your lap. The difference is what happens in the forty minutes after that, which in this car is very little.

Going out to a flight it works the other way round. A car this quiet is a good place to read the papers you should have read yesterday, and there is a flat surface either side of the rear armrest that will hold a laptop steady enough to type on, which is not true of every seat in this fleet.

Air suspension does most of the work, and the effect is that surfaces you would feel in another car simply stop registering. Expansion joints on a flyover, patched tarmac through roadworks, the ripple where a bus lane has been rutted by twenty years of buses: the S-Class rounds all of it off. On a long journey that is the difference between arriving fresh and arriving stiff.

A chauffeur still has to drive it properly. The car is long, so the line through a roundabout is taken wider and earlier, and the rear wheels track further inside the front ones than most people expect. Kerbing a rear wheel in a car this size is a beginner’s error and it is felt in the back as a thump.

Where it needs thought is the stop. Long saloons cannot use every hotel forecourt, some mews turns have to be taken in two movements, and a few underground ramps are steep enough to catch the front of the car. So the last two hundred metres of a route are planned separately from the rest of it, usually the day before, and occasionally by going and driving them.