It is the apogee of long-range personal transit, yet extinction beckons because diesel has become so unfashionable.
While such cars remain, our duty is to revel in them. Having fluked the perfect wheels, I did just that on this Alpine road trip. Fluked? Once we had sorted travel dates, I opened the road test diary. It reaches further into the future than you might think, mapping out when the main tests in the mag will run.
Sometimes a juicy candidate materialises at short notice and we scramble to fit it in, but mostly it’s all planned. Cue a shiver of delight on seeing that the oil-burning Merc’s test window tallied with this trip.
Forget MIRA: this would be real-life graft. A consumer test beasting. We even found some winter Continentals, their luridly tall sidewalls promising even greater comfort.
Alas, my wife wanted to ease the journey out to Switzerland with an overnight stop. Wanting to fully tap into the Merc’s touring credentials, I was in camp ‘one hit’.
So I drew her attention to the quilted seats, and assured her the mightiest non-AMG E really is as quiet as a Range Rover at 70mph (I didn’t crack out the road test data).
And it did the trick. Result: 600 miles and an early start, with the concession that we would use the tunnel – these days ‘LeShuttle’ – to cross to France. It’s the rational approach if you need to beat a path deep into Europe on day one. On a weekday, you can even rocket from junction 11a of the M20 to the train itself in 20 minutes, which is miraculous considering the ferry alternative.