The future's electric, surely?

Sure, it's coming, but even Mercedes-Benz's own EQ plan, which will see the company flogging as much as 25 per cent of its model line-up with an extension cord and a battery, is a good few years away. So there's a new engine line-up from the German luxury firm. There are no half measures either, with a modular strategy bringing five new engines from four to eight cylinders, each promising more power, lower emissions and improved economy over the units they replace.

How do they keep doing that?

Depending on which of the engines sits under the bonnet of your C-, E- or S-Class - or one of the many SUV spin-offs of each model - there's some trick tech allowing all these improvements. All have Merc's Nanoslide coating, which smooths the friction between the cylinder wall and piston; that's aided too by the combination of steel pistons with aluminium blocks, the differing thermal properties of each material allowing even greater friction improvements. There are all sorts of clever advances in the stop-start tech too, with electrical integrated starter assist, 48-volt technology on the in-line six and even an electric turbo on some versions.

So the electricity is creeping in?

There are a lot of useful things learned from hybrids, here. For example, the in-line six-cylinder petrol and V8 both come with electric starters that give a boost at low revs and help with coasting functions (the V8 in addition having cylinder deactivation), all of which allows the in-line six to offer V8 outputs (408hp and 500Nm initially) with economy and emissions some 15 per cent better than the outgoing V6s... Oh, and that V8 is built by AMG.

So an AMG with cylinder deactivation?

Not now, no; the V8 will go under the bonnet of the new Mercedes S-Class next year, although there's nothing to stop that tech filtering back to the AMG models that use a very similar V8. The new engine family requires the latest engine software (and 'CAN bus' electrical system to allow it) so it'll feed into the line-up in time. The 2.0-litre turbodiesel has already been seen in the E-Class, and the S-Class gets an upgrade of its electrical architecture to allow the new engines - likewise the C-Class should do so when it gets its next big revision.

Anything else?

Mercedes-Benz's press release is about 60 pages long, and without an engineering degree, or at least some understanding of advanced combustion, it'd be lost on anyone other than the boffins that came up with it. Safe to say that spending a day with the uber intelligent engineers at Merc's new AIZ engine testing facility - itself all-new, very clever and costing 600m Euros - underlined that there's life in the combustion engine for a good while yet, the new engine family ensuring that.

Kyle Fortune - 28 Oct 2016