Hello all,

I’m new here and wanted to introduce myself a little. My name is Jaka Prašnikar and I come from a small country called Slovenia, with around 2 million people.

In short, I have always loved luxury cars. Not necessarily “expensive” cars, but cars with that luxury feeling. My first car ever was a fully equipped Škoda Superb in 2017. When Škoda released that model, I was like, “I must have this.” The Superb is basically a mix between a VW Golf and a Passat, but for the price, it was an awesome car. It had DCC, was very smooth, and was relaxing to drive. The noise insulation was poor, though, so I took the entire interior apart and added a lot of sound-deadening material to keep the noise to a minimum. I loved that car, but the suspension was always a bit noisy, and after around 100K km, I decided to switch.




Then I got a fully equipped Volvo V90, my first time buying a 2-year-old used car. The luxury feeling from the Škoda to the Volvo was incredible. Everything felt two levels better. The leather was Nappa, the seats were amazing, the Bowers & Wilkins sound system was insane, and the torque-converter automatic was smooth as hell. I really loved the car. The noise insulation sucked, though, so I repeated the same process: 48 hours of dismantling the car and adding sound-deadening material. I had the car for 2 years and 120K km, but I had a lot of issues, including a cracked piston. I drive fast and visit Germany a lot, so I often push cars above 200 km/h. It seems that didn’t go too well with Volvo diesel engines, so I had a lot of problems. The car itself was amazing inside: zero rattles, no noise, and everything except the engine and drivetrain was just perfect. Of course, that was before the 180 km/h limiter and before the newer software, which is crap now.



Next came my plan to own the German holy trinity, so I decided I wanted to buy Audi, Mercedes, and BMW over the next few years. My first stop was an Audi S6 C8 Avant. That was in 2021, again a 2-year-old car, fully equipped: rear-wheel steering, air suspension, quattro sport with 40:60 split and torque vectoring, Bang & Olufsen with 1330W, basically everything except the panoramic roof. The first thing I noticed was the noise insulation. Silence. At 250 km/h on the German Autobahn, you could still speak normally with passengers. The dynamic air suspension was precise and damped so well that once I hit a pothole hard enough to bend an alloy wheel, and I didn’t even feel it. The software was okay, but I really didn’t like the dual-screen setup. I also had a decent amount of rattles, which I solved, and constant lane assist and start-stop annoyance. That was really the only big problem I had with the car. I loved the car, but I lost my main client and had to get rid of it because the upkeep cost was insane. I was also replacing tyres three times a year. Then came almost a year of not owning anything, and I was driving my girlfriend’s Kia Sportage, which drove me nuts.



At some point, I realized I needed to buy a car, otherwise I was going to lose my mind. So I found a cheap BMW G31 530d with 220K km and bought it right away. This was the worst investment of my life. The issues never stopped. My girlfriend and I ended up fixing things together, and it was one issue after another. I really loved the refined inline-six diesel and the awesome ZF transmission, but I spent more keeping the car running than I paid for the car itself. So I sold it and continued driving the Kia from May 2025 until April 2026. Still, that BMW probably had the best interior quality of any car I had owned up to that point. The classic buttons, virtual display, and head-up display were really good. The noise insulation was okay too, and I never felt the need to upgrade it. The Harman Kardon sounded good for the base price, and the driving experience was really good, but the car felt a bit too sporty for my style. It was never harsh, though, so I liked it. For the price I paid, it was a really good car. Compared to the Škoda, Volvo, and Audi, the BMW had some features and driving characteristics I preferred. I loved the engine response and transmission. xDrive also felt fun in the snow, because you could easily drift it with AWD. BMW really has some awesome software engineers. But in the end, it still wasn’t quite my style.



So we decided to buy a VW Arteon R Shooting Brake together, selling my girlfriend’s car, and tune it to 500 hp. While trying to get a bank loan, we noticed a 2019 Mercedes S-Class at a dealer with only 120K km. I told my girlfriend I wanted to test drive it, because, well, it’s an S-Class. I wanted to feel what it means to drive a car like that. For context, I had driven the Mercedes E-Class before, a few times. Before buying the Audi and BMW, I test-drove the E350d and E400d multiple times, but I could never find the right used car. They were either missing equipment I wanted, like air suspension, head-up display, good sound system, or a specific interior design, or they had insane mileage. Everyone in the car world says the S-Class is the best luxury car. So we went to test drive it. I think it took about the first 100 meters for me to be shocked. WOW. How the hell can a car be this quiet, refined, and smooth? Those were the thoughts going through my mind. How did they achieve this? How does the adaptive damping work without making the suspension too soft? How do the air struts soften and stiffen so much? How can the transmission shift so smoothly? The engine felt almost like an electric car. I have driven EVs, and this felt similar in terms of refinement: zero shakes, and under acceleration you mostly just hear it quietly in the background. I was genuinely wowed. But the asking price was a bit high, and the car didn’t have the equipment I wanted, so I had already decided it definitely wouldn’t be my next car. Mid-test drive, I asked my girlfriend to drive so she could feel the S-Class compared to my previous cars. She didn’t say much, just, “Yeah, it’s nice.” Then we got back to the dealer, and my girlfriend basically turned into a puppy. Big eyes, full excitement, and suddenly: “We need to buy this.” I kept my emotions in check and tried to calm her down, but she had already told the dealer that we were selling her car there and buying the S-Class. I was very surprised, because my girlfriend doesn’t buy cars, haha. She had bought three Kia Sportages, and all of them were such crap cars that I never said one nice thing about them. Don’t get me wrong, for the money she paid, I just feel she could have bought something way better. Anyway, when we got home, she told me the Arteon was crap, and she didn’t want it. She wanted the S-Class. I kept trying to explain that it is a very high-maintenance car, but she didn’t care. She even got another job just to help afford it. Yeah. A non-car girl, who never wanted to spend extra money on cars, got another job to be able to afford an S-Class. So after all that, I couldn’t say no. We ended up buying a different Mercedes S 400d, a 2019 model with 140K km, but with the equipment I wanted.



I know it’s not really fair to compare the cars I owned before, but the S-Class exceeds all my expectations and more. It is honestly the best car I have ever owned or driven. I have driven in a Bentley Continental GT and Flying Spur, 2024+, which are my dream cars, but cars like Bentley and Rolls-Royce are not really in the normal “car” category for me. And even then, at a 600K asking price, they are not that much better than the 2019 S-Class we bought. So this is now my first Mercedes-Benz, and I couldn’t be happier about it. I have already taken apart a few things, because some of the plastics are annoying, and I like to rest my leg on the centre console. Every tiny movement makes some noise or cracking sounds, which is super annoying for a 160K EUR car. But I can live with that, because it is mostly solvable. The noise insulation, engine and transmission refinement, infotainment system, and physical buttons are exactly what I like. Yes, I love physical buttons, and I’m 33 years old. I hate new cars with touch-only interiors. The Audi was super annoying in the cold, and to turn off start-stop on every start, you had to wait for the bottom screen to load. The plastics and new screens in the W223 are also meh to me. Cars are really going downhill in some ways. This was also one of the reasons we bought this S-Class. I feel it is one of the last generations I would actually want to own, and because of depreciation, we could afford it.

So yeah, this is my short story. Sorry, I know it’s a lot to read, but this is just the essence of it all. Thank you for reading.