I have been driving the new S-class Mercedes for the past week.

A nice motor. Comfy. With a recommended price on the road of around £56,000 there are certain expectations. The last model in the S-class series was good. Comparable to the Lexus GS400.

This one must have escaped through a side door at Stuttgart while nobody was watching.

The car is terrible!

Most of you will have had experience with the new generation of TVs. They come with remote controls with buttons and functions able to programme the universe. Accidently touch the wrong button and you are cast into a remote underworld of TV land you didn't know existed. The usual escape is to turn the TV off, get back to default settings and turn it on again.

This overengineering of simple tasks sums up the new S-class Mercedes to a T.

My basic thinking is that you should be able to get into an unfamiliar car, take a couple of minutes getting the seat and the mirrors adjusted and drive wherever you want to go.

I picked up the car at 6 o'clock last Tuesday night at Harthill. I had to be in London the following morning. I drove to Penrith that evening. Had a few hours sleep then drove to Luton and caught a train into London.

Nothing in this car is intuitive. I was in Birmingham before I worked out how to adjust the mirrors. I was in Luton before I managed to turn on the radio.

I stopped at the Watford Gap service area at the north end of the M1 for a cup of coffee. Back in the car and onto the motorway and the car seemed to be stuck in 1st gear. I pulled over but couldn't see anything amiss. Back under way and the car is changing up to fourth. Closer inspection of the dash suggests that the car is in the manual drive option. A flick on the steering wheel buttons confirms that I do have some measure of control over the gear selection through the Formula 1 style buttons. Click on the right button for an up shift, click on the left button for a down shift. Brilliant.

After the next comfort stop, it was back to the default settings and fully automatic.

This car is not idiot proof.

Just as with the remote control, you can accidentaly hit a button and end up in an unexpected cul-de-sac. On the busy highways of Britain switching off to re-boot the car to the default settings isn't always a practical option.

In a world where there are chips in everything, even the simplest gadgets can be programmed to do amazing things. It is the nature of engineers to try to impress and dazzle with all of the razz-mattazz of the new technology. But at the end of the day, the gadget must do its intended job. Product designers have to restrain the engineering imagination so that the basic functions are delivered in a simple manner. The added features can then be accessed through various menu options.

The new S-class Mercedes is the engineering mind gone wild with no thought for the end user.

Mercedes spend vast sums of money in Formula 1. Did Lewis Hamilton ever drive this car?

The very simplest of things are done badly.

The gear selection is backwords from standard practice with Reverse at the top and Drive at the bottom of the column lever selection. The engine has to be running if you want to put the car in Park. In the past week I have had to restart the car twenty or thirty times before I could park and get out of the car.

I'm still working on the various drive options with the 7G-Tronic seven speed automatic transmission. These are C or Comfort, S or Sports and M or Manual.

You might think that Manual means that the driver is in control of the car.

Wrong.

There are various automatic overrides. Button response is unpredictable. The result is that you are never sure what gear the car is in. You have to constantly check the dash indicator. Repeated visual refocusing is not compatible with rapid motoring.

Contrary to expectations, the manual buttons do work in C or S. I suspect that the engineers forgot to tell the technical writers who were doing the text for the instruction manual.

Actually, the buttons work much better in S mode than they do in M.

This car should be withdrawn before it does serious damage to the Mercedes brand image of competent German engineering.

Bring back the Classic S-Class Mercedes.