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"   There are neighborhoods in New Jersey where the sight of a new black Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan will cause shopkeepers to piss themselves and make old ladies dive for their beads. Only criminals drive such cars either the mob variety or the Goldman Sachs Harvard M.B.A. kind. But wait, this one&amp;#039;s an S400, a hybrid. Is that even possible? This is not a mystery economist Thorstein Veblen remotely anticipated. A century ago, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, he argued that wealth and status were defined by &amp;quot;conspicuous consumption,&amp;quot; which is to say deliberate waste and profligacy in the form of champagne and homes in the Hamptons. Today, however, noting that the new Mercedes-Benz S400 hybrid and a raft of other upcoming luxury cars are attempting to reconcile power and prestige with some sort of political correctness, he might have viewed carbon as the new emblem of the rich.  Partly it&amp;#039;s a matter of car companies anticipating higher fuel-economy and greenhouse-gas requirements in the next few years. Partly it&amp;#039;s an effort at greenwashing their images, nakedly so. Yet it&amp;#039;s also a fact that wealthy people are feeling increasingly ashamed of their own wealth, or more exactly, of the outsized carbon footprints it leaves behind. After all, nothing says &amp;quot;cluelessly rich&amp;quot; like a greenhouse-gas-spewing G5 jet. Automakers&amp;#039; early efforts along these lines are, so far, imperfect, if not downright hilarious. Take the new Bentley Continental Supersports, a 621 hp, turbo-W-12, 204-mile-per-hour monster of a car whose concession to the greenies is that it drinks E85, ethanol. To drive across Iowa in the Bentley, you&amp;#039;d have to practically denude the state to supply the fuel.  The Mercedes S400, on the other hand, is the first production car to use a purpose-built lithium-ion battery pack. (Other hybrids use nickel-metal-hydride; the Tesla roadster uses off-the-shelf lithium cells.) The S400&amp;#039;s 0.9-amp-hour, 120-volt pack is small enough to fit in the engine bay and provides juice to a comparatively small electric motor (20 hp and 118 pound-feet of torque) to abet the V-6 engine&amp;#039;s 275 hp and 258 pound-feet of torque. The S400 can&amp;#039;t move on electric power alone, but the hybrid power train allows the car to shut down the gas engine when slowing or stopped, thus improving in-city mileage (19 miles per gallon). Altogether, the S400 is 19 percent more fuel efficient than the S550. It&amp;#039;s also a bit cheaper: The base price ($87,950) is $3,650 less than an S550.  In most other respects, the S400 is exactly like its V-8- and V-12-powered siblings which is to say spectacular. The S-Class foundation is so transcendentally quiet and solid, you can&amp;#039;t even tell when the gas engine cycles off and on. This is a big, broad, and audacious car that is, despite its hybridization, enormously athletic (zero to 60 miles per hour in 7.2 seconds). The trunk, uncompromised by any battery pack, remains huge definitely four-wiseguy capacity.  But perhaps the most valuable bit of hardware is the six-letter HYBRID badge on the trunk, which will assuage rich-guy guilt as well as any Prius. Now that&amp;#039;s engineering. Two More to Consider: Porsche Panamera Hybrid  Sharing the gas-electric propulsion system of the upcoming Porsche Cayenne hybrid SUV, the 2011 Panamera hybrid (which will look a lot like the 2010 Panamera, above) will effortlessly convey four people at bullet-train speeds and get about 30 miles per gallon, though perhaps not at the same time. BMW Active-Hybrid 7  With a twin-turbo V-8 buttoned to a feisty little electric motor (and eight-speed transmission), the 2010 ActiveHybrid 7 punches out 455 hp and 516 pound-feet of torque, enough to propel the eco-dreadnought to 60 miles per hour in 4.9 seconds, while returning about 20 miles per gallon. The Greatest, Fastest, Most Exhilarating Cars You Can Own &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/cars/a6763/mercedes-s400-hybrid-review-0110/>