The Mercedes S-Class letter simply meant special, and the meaning kept drifting
Before Mercedes-Benz ranked its cars into tidy classes, an S after a model number just meant special, from the German Sonderklasse. It was stuck on whatever seemed upmarket at the time. One 1949 special model slid down to become a discount car within about four years.
Before the war, Mercedes numbered each model by engine displacement, on the logic that bigger engines meant more prestige. With limited tooling after 1945, the company instead tacked on an S suffix for anything more upscale than its parent. The 170S of 1949 to 1951 carried a newer chassis and larger body than the ordinary 170V and 170D, yet by 1953 hybrid 170S versions were the budget models. Sometimes the letter marked a different body, as with the two-door 300S, or simply a facelift. Other letters joined it: E for injection, from Einspritzung, and L for long, meaning an extra 10 centimetres of rear legroom.
Only in 1972 did the name become official, with the W116 sedans. Built through 1980, 473,035 of them were produced, and for the first time Mercedes put safety openly ahead of styling. Its production-car firsts included heavily padded steering wheels and dashboards, head restraints with a central dip to keep heads centred in a rear impact, deep channels that steered rainwater off the windscreen and side windows, ribbed tail-lamp lenses that stayed readable when dirty, and a first aid kit recessed in the rear shelf. Later S-Classes brought the first seatbelt pretensioners.
Retroactively, the lineage reaches back to the six-cylinder Ponton cars of 1954, Mercedes' first model without a separate frame, and to the Fintail cars whose rear fins the company insisted were functional markers for reversing. The 1968 300 SEL 6.3 borrowed the huge V8 from the 600 Pullman limousine.
When the compact C-Class arrived in 1993, the whole range was reorganised into lettered classes, and the S-Class settled as the flagship it remains.
Source: Mercedes-Benz S-Class
