mercedes

Mercedes-Benz USA has an answer to complaints that car navigation directions don't measure up to those from sites like Yahoo, Google and Ask.

The automaker has partnered with Google and Yahoo to allow users to send customized Google Maps and Yahoo Local Maps directly from a computer or Web-enabled cell phone to their car computer.

A new "Send to Car" icon that will appear on both companies' mapping sites will allow you to send customized directions, maps, addresses and points of interest to your Mercedes' GPS navigation system.

Once you get in your car, pushing the "… Read more

Mercedes-Benz let us loose in its new CLK63 AMG Black Series this week for a drive around the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Black Series is a fantastic car to tackle winding roads with 500 horsepower, a very smart 7 speed automatic transmission, and handling that holds the road with a vise grip. AMG is the performance tuning branch of Mercedes-Benz, and it took the CLK-Class, a two-seater coupe, and dropped a big, 6.3-liter engine in it, then added AMG's SpeedShift technology to the transmission. But then someone decided to kick it up a notch and came up with … Read more

Over dinner on Tuesday night, Geoff Day, director of corporate communications for Mercedes-Benz, hinted at many major announcements for the upcoming Frankfurt auto show. His big promise: Mercedes-Benz will introduce 19 cars in 15 minutes. These won't all be new cars, with probably a mix of concepts and updates, but Mercedes-Benz intends to make a big splash this year. We expect to see some sort of hybrid in the mix, although we couldn't pin him down on the details. The most firm information we got was the previously leaked F700 concept, rumored to be a big luxury car, … Read more

One often-cited alternative to gasoline-powered cars is hydrogen. Editors Michael Kanellos and Brian Cooley took a look at one example of a hydrogen-powered test car, a small Mercedes. To keep Kanellos from endangering himself and said vehicle, they set the top speed on this hydro-chariot at only 85 miles per hour. Take a look.

It's difficult to describe the smell of boiling brake fluid and barbecued brake discs. Or the sound of a BMW M6 being flogged to within an inch of its life, squealing for mercy as it hangs on to traction by the skin of its Z-rated rubber. We just got back from a day of track testing at California's Laguna Seca raceway, courtesy of the Western Automotive Journalist association, and can report it was by far the most enjoyable day's work we've done for a long time.

Among the cars up for grabs were many of the … Read more

I could tell you just how quick the 2007 Mercedes-Benz CL550 is by quoting a bunch of dry statistics (0 to 60mph in 5.4 seconds, top speed governed at 155mph, net power 382 hp, net torque 391 lb-ft, blah, blah, blah), but I thought it might be more instructive to provide some real-world evidence courtesy of California Highway Patrol. Yes, I was just out on one of our highly scientific test drives for a CNET Car Tech review when I saw the five-o in the auto-dimming rearview mirror; they wasted no time in presenting me with a speeding ticket, … Read more

No matter how well you arrange the lighting and polish up the fenders, you just can't control everything. This was a lesson that Mercedes-Benz learned here at the 2007 New York auto show when the roof sprang a leak directly above its 2008 350 sedan, making its North American debut in front of thousands of journalists on the show's press preview days. Staff from the convention center did their best to clean up the unexpected interior downpour, but not before the car got a good dousing. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the Mercedes press release on the new … Read more

While Audi lost the World Car of the Year award to the self-parking Lexus, there are other areas in which the German company made its mark this year.

Audi took the 2007 World Car Design of the Year Award for the Audi TT and the 2007 World Car Performance Award for the Audi RS4.

"There is a segment of the public for whom performance overrides all else, said Dan Carney, director of the award committee and an automotive journalist for Edmunds Inside Line, MSNBC and other publications.

Mercedes-Benz took the 2007 World Green Car Award for its E320 Bluetec. … Read more

Two digits instead of three on the back of a modern Mercedes Benz mean only one thing: enhanced performance courtesy of AMG, Mercedes' in-house tuning arm. To celebrate 40 years of souping up cars (first as a standalone company, then as a part of Mercedes-Benz), AMG is building a super-limited-edition version of the Mercedes CL dubbed the CL65 AMG 40th Edition. The car, which makes its debut here at the 2007 New York auto show and which will have a production run of just 40 units, boasts a hand-built 6.0-liter twin-turbo V12 engine that produces 604 horsepower and 738 … Read more