The Mercedes S-Class, and why it is still the chauffeur standard

Ask anyone in this trade to picture a chauffeur car and they picture the same one. Here is what the S-Class actually does for the person sitting behind the driver — and the two occasions when we send something else.

There is a reason the same car keeps appearing outside hotels on the Herengracht, at the General Aviation Terminal on the far side of Schiphol, and in the loading bay of every conference centre in the Netherlands. The Mercedes-Benz S-Class has been the working tool of this trade for decades, and it holds that position not because of a badge but because of a set of unglamorous engineering decisions, all of them made on behalf of the person in the back seat. This is what those decisions feel like from the passenger’s side of the partition — and where the car’s limits actually are.

The car that other cars are measured against

The S-Class sits at the top of the Mercedes-Benz passenger range, and it is the model where the company puts what it has learned before the rest of the range gets it. What matters for chauffeur work is the design brief behind it: unlike almost every other saloon on the road, the S-Class is laid out around the rear seat rather than the driver’s seat. The back is the good seat. Everything from the door aperture to the placement of the air vents follows from that.

In our own fleet the S-Class is the core of First Class, sharing that tier with the electric EQS, the EQS SUV and the BMW i7. All of them carry up to three passengers and three bags, all of them are black, and all of them arrive with a chauffeur in a suit. The S-Class is simply the one people recognise, which is part of the point when a car is meeting a guest who has never been to the Netherlands before.

What the long wheelbase actually buys you

The wheelbase is the distance between the front and rear axles. Most executive saloons are sold in one length; the S-Class is sold in two, and the longer version puts every extra centimetre between the doors rather than in the boot or the bonnet. That is the version chauffeur operators specify, and it is the single biggest reason the car feels different from the outside in.

• Legroom that survives a suit. A tall passenger can sit upright with their knees clear of the seat in front, which matters more after eleven hours in economy than any material on the dashboard.
• A door you step through. The rear opening is long enough to walk into the seat rather than fold down into it — useful in a narrow Amsterdam street where the door cannot swing fully open.
• Space for the things people carry into the back: a laptop bag, a suit carrier, a document wallet that should not go in the boot.
• A flat, uninterrupted floor area in front of the rear bench, so nobody straddles a transmission tunnel for an hour on the A4.

Length has one cost: manoeuvring. Where the car is fitted with rear-axle steering — the back wheels turning a few degrees against the fronts at low speed — that cost largely disappears, and a long saloon slips into a canal-side loading bay more easily than its footprint suggests. It is the sort of detail a passenger never notices, which is exactly the mark of a good one.

Quiet is a feature, even though nobody asks for it

If you had to choose one property that separates a chauffeur car from a well-equipped family car, it would be noise. Laminated side glass, heavy door seals and air springs instead of steel ones do not photograph well, but together they take the motorway out of the cabin. On the A2 between Amsterdam and Utrecht, at the speed everyone actually drives, the difference is the difference between shouting into a conference call and holding a normal conversation.

The same quiet is what lets people sleep. A great many of our First Class bookings are inbound long-haul arrivals at Schiphol, and the drive to a hotel in the canal ring is thirty minutes that the passenger would rather spend unconscious. Air suspension smooths the expansion joints on the elevated sections of the A10 ring road; the seal around the doors takes care of the rest.

The rear seat, read as a working space

Sit in the back and the layout explains itself. The centre armrest folds down into a console with its own controls, there are screens on the backs of the front seats, and the rear has its own climate settings rather than whatever the driver has chosen. Reading lights are aimed at the seat rather than the ceiling. It is a compartment, not a back row.

What we add to that is deliberately ordinary and, in our experience, more used than any of the technology: still water, and charging cables for both iOS and Android handsets. A guest who lands with a dead phone and a meeting in ninety minutes cares about the cable. The screens are a pleasant surprise; the cable is the thing that saves the afternoon.

Two siblings: the EQS and the Maybach

The S-Class no longer travels alone. The EQS is Mercedes-Benz’s electric saloon at the same level of the range, and in our booking flow it sits in the same class at the same price, so a request for First Class may be answered by either. For a passenger the practical difference is that the electric car removes the last mechanical sound from the cabin — there is no engine note to mask, only tyres and air. On a late-evening run through the Zuidas, Amsterdam’s business district south of the centre, an EQS is quieter than most rooms.

Above both sits the Mercedes-Maybach S-Class, which is the same car taken further: a longer rear compartment for two passengers rather than three, reclining rear seats and champagne flutes in the console. We run it as a separate tier — see the Maybach — with fixed prices between Schiphol and Amsterdam and everything else quoted on request over WhatsApp. It is never a first-come booking, because there is no point promising a car of that kind and then explaining that it is already out.

When we send something else

The honest limitation of the S-Class is the same as that of any saloon: three passengers and three bags. Those two numbers decide more bookings than anything written above. A family of four flying in with four check-in cases will fit into the seats and not into the boot, and the right answer is Van Class — a Mercedes V-Class or the electric EQV, with seven seats, seven bags and a sliding door.

• Three adults with cabin bags, or two adults with full check-in luggage: the S-Class, comfortably.
• Four or more passengers, a pushchair, golf clubs or a group travelling together: Van Class, or two cars leaving at the same time on one booking.
• Two passengers who want the most formal arrival available: the Maybach, arranged in advance.

What it costs to sit in the back

For the run most visitors care about, First Class between Schiphol and anywhere in Amsterdam is fixed: €90 towards the airport and €140 from it, per car, taxes included, with flight tracking, a chauffeur inside the arrivals hall holding a name sign and sixty minutes of free waiting after landing. By the hour the same car and chauffeur are €100 per hour, with a two-hour minimum and forty kilometres included in each hour, starting and ending in the same city. Everything else — a run to The Hague, a day around the province, a leg to Brussels or Düsseldorf — is quoted as one fixed all-in figure before you confirm. There is no meter in the car, and there never has been.

That is the whole argument for the S-Class, really. It is not a car that makes a journey exciting. It is a car that makes a journey uneventful, at a moment when the passenger has already had quite enough events for one day. If you want the full specification, capacities and photographs, they are on the S-Class page in our fleet.

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