Seven days in a luxury saloon
We keep hire cars for a week rather than an hour, because a week is what it takes to find the flaw. This was a long-wheelbase executive saloon from a German maker, taken on Lowveld tar, over one pass, and into a hot car park every afternoon.
Updated 15 October 2026Mbombela
Why a week, not an afternoon
An afternoon tells you about the showroom smell and the steering weight. It tells you nothing about the fourth hour, which is where a seat either holds you or starts to ache under the left shoulder blade. It tells you nothing about how the boot lid behaves when your hands are full, or whether the door seals whistle at a hundred and twenty with a crosswind off the De Kaap valley, or whether the stop-start system becomes maddening in Mbombela traffic between the robots on Samora Machel Drive.
So the brief was simple. Drive it the way a reader over fifty-five would: the airport run to the strip east of White River, two long days on the N4 towards Middelburg and back, the escarpment loop with a passenger who gets car-sick, and a week of ordinary errands with a boot full of nothing in particular. Indicative hire for this class in Mbombela is R2 400 to R3 400 a day, which is a serious number and raises the standard of judgement accordingly.
Seat support on the long haul
The front seats were the best part of the car. Fourteen-way adjustment, a seat base that extends about sixty millimetres for a long thigh, and four-stage lumbar that genuinely moves rather than inflating a vague bladder. After three and a half hours from the Highveld descent to home, neither driver nor passenger wanted to get out and stretch, which is a rare thing. The ventilated cushions earned their place on the second afternoon when the car had been standing in the sun at thirty-nine degrees.
The rear bench was less convincing than the brochure's leg-room figure suggests. Space was abundant, but the cushion is short and set low, so an older passenger with a stiff hip has to drop into it and then haul themselves up past a wide sill. If the person you drive most often struggles with a low sofa, they will struggle with this back seat, and a tall crossover with hip-height seating will serve them better regardless of what the badge says.
Ride quality on patched tar
On good surfaces the air suspension is remarkable and the cabin is quiet enough to hold a conversation at a whisper. On the patched section between Karino and the airport turn-off, where the tar has been cut and filled repeatedly, the car on twenty-inch wheels thumped in a way that embarrassed it. Dropping the suspension into comfort helped the big bumps and did nothing for the sharp edges, because sharp edges are tyre sidewall, not damping.
That is the whole argument about wheel sizes on South African roads, and this car made it for us. The same model on nineteens with a fifty-section tyre, which is a no-cost option at order time and therefore occasionally appears in a hire fleet, rides considerably better here and costs far less to repair when a pothole on the R538 after rain finds a rim. If a counter offers you a choice within the same class, take the smaller wheel.
Running cost over seven days
Nine hundred and sixty kilometres over the week, mostly open road, returned an indicated eight point four litres per hundred from a three-litre six-cylinder diesel, which is genuinely good and worked out to about R1 450 of fuel at the pump price we paid. Full-to-full policy, returned full, no admin fee. The deposit hold was R8 000 on a credit card and fell off eleven working days after return.
Where the sums turn uncomfortable is the excess. This class carried R65 000 standard, reduced to R12 000 with a waiver at R310 a day, or R2 170 across the week. We paid it, and we would again, because a stone chip in a windscreen with a heated element and a camera bracket behind it is a R22 000 part on these cars, and the escarpment throws stones. That one line nearly matched three days of the base rate.
What the week told us
It told us that this kind of car is superb for the N4 and slightly wasted everywhere else around here. If your driving is Mbombela to Gauteng and back twice a month, it is close to ideal and the seats alone justify it. If your driving is the escarpment, the reserve approach roads and the school run through Riverside, you are paying a premium for refinement you cannot use and accepting repair costs you will eventually meet.
The honest recommendation after seven days: hire the big saloon for the long trip and keep something with sixty-five-section tyres and a hundred and eighty millimetres of clearance for ordinary Lowveld life. That is not a compromise, it is just matching the tool to the road, and it is the single most useful thing a week-long hire can teach you before you spend money on a car of your own.
Three things to carry with you
- 01Four hours in a seat is the test; anything shorter flatters every car ever built.
- 02Smaller rims with more sidewall ride better on patched Lowveld tar and cost a third to repair.
- 03At R310 a day, the waiver on a premium class nearly equalled three days of base rate.
Read on
Send us the contract before you sign it
Five minutes of reading at this desk has saved readers five-figure excess claims more than once. Tell us the car class, the dates, the route and the counter, and we will come back with the figures that matter.