2009 Mercedes-Benz CLS550: Plush ride on Pelee

ANDREW MEESON FOR THE TORONTO STAR

The MV Jiimaan is the only way to get your vehicle to Pelee Island -- which means parking the $100,000 CLS550 in steerage class, cheek by jowl with the riff-raff.

Andrew Meeson

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

PELEE ISLAND–"Look at me, sir," the man in the Day-Glo orange vest commanded. "Watch my hands."

Standing in the hull of the Pelee Island ferry, he was doing his best to corral a few dozen cars into the parking deck – including our $100,000 2009 Mercedes CLS550.

The cars on each 26-kilometre crossing that the MV Jiimaan makes between the mainland and pastoral island in Lake Erie have to be equally distributed inside the ship's hull.

So the CLS550, which measures 4,913 mm from stem to stern and 2,107 mm from port to starboard had to be parallel parked in a space rarely seen outside of Yorkville's narrow lanes.

But among its many features, the CLS was equipped with Parktronic, a warning system to help ease you into tight spots. The fine minds at Mercedes engineering could certainly overcome this nautical nightmare.

Except Mr. Day-Glo was having none of that.

Instead, he ordered me to line up the CLS with the side of the bruised minivan in front, then crank the wheel over hard and back the car in.

Which is when the Parktronic system sprang to life, pinging and flashing warning lights on the dash and upper rear roof displays like a scene out of a Klingon attack in Star Trek.

I obeyed the warning, and hit the brakes.

"No! Look at me, sir! Look at my hands; don't look at the car," said the usher urgently. Yeah, right. It wasn't him who was responsible for the metallic Obsidian paint job.

But the government-run Jiimaan is the only way to get your vehicle to and from the 4,000-hectare island off the coast of Leamington. Which meant parking our car on a deck in steerage class, cheek by jowl with the riff-raff in their Dodge Caravans and Ford F-150s.

The commanding voice proved irresistible. Slowly I eased the CLS back. "Hard right! Okay, now straight! No, straighter! Now keep backing up," he said.

"It's okay, keep going – now hard left!"

It's doubtful Mercedes had the Pelee Island ferry in mind when it added the automatic parking system to the CLS550.

Still, if you take a refined highway cruiser costing six figures on a getaway to a bucolic island some four hours southwest of Toronto, you have to figure on making some adjustments.

Like not having near enough pavement for the mighty 382 hp V8 to really stretch out on. In fact, more than half the island's roads were unpaved gravel and after a monsoon-like downpour the previous night, were more mudhole than billiard table. Maybe an SUV would have been a better choice.

There's a good reason the roads are in the shape they're in, according to Ron Tiessen, curator of the island Heritage Centre,

The island's profile is shaped like a saucer, which means more than 45 per cent of it – the entire middle section – should be under water.

However, in the late-19th century, local entrepreneurs reclaimed the wetland in the centre by building a series of drainage canals, dikes and pumping stations – four of which constantly drain the canals into Lake Erie.

The muck dredged to make the canals forms the base of the roads. "We're basically driving on dikes built in the late 1800s," said Tiessen. "Besides, we have too few people as a tax base to maintain the roads, though we repair them as best we can."

Though our CLS wasn't the full-on $150,000 518 hp AMG version, it was equipped with all kinds of ride adjustment programs, including one that raised it 35 mm, for rough roads. It also meant we couldn't go faster than 120 km/h, because the car would automatically lower to improve handling.

There are also a couple of buttons you can push to change the CLS from a comfy cruiser to, well, if not exactly a more sporty road burner, they at least tighten the suspension and change the shift points for faster acceleration (and thirstier gas consumption). Standing still, the CLS is truly a thing of beauty with its arcing body lines; in motion it's another matter.

You wouldn't exactly call the 1,800-plus kilogram CLS550 "lithe," so every little bit of sportiness helps. After a few kilometres testing the different settings, I wasn't sure why you'd ever want to drive it in regular comfort mode.

When you're in this snack bracket, do you really care about fuel consumption?

Even the paddle shifters (part of our "AMG premium package") lost their novelty quickly. Besides, I couldn't come close to the sure, smooth shifting of the CLS's automatic transmission.

You wouldn't want to tap into the CLS's performance potential on Pelee, as it's only 16 kilometres long and 7 kilometres across. Anything faster than a snail's pace and you'd run out of things to see and blast past the island's laidback charms.

These included the Pelee Island Winery Pavilion (the actual winery is on the mainland) and Tiessen's Heritage Centre, where you can learn about the geological origins of the island, its use as a staging point for rum-runners during the Prohibition or just gawk at the jumble of kites from around the world in the kite museum.

And if you weren't cosseted in a luxury sedan, you might also want to get out and enjoy the natural beauty Pelee is justly famous for. It's home to bird and plant species that you just don't find anywhere else in Canada.

"It's really reminiscent of the south," said Tiessen. "The appearance and sounds in our woods are quite different from anything you'd experience in Muskoka."

And for that weekend, those rare sounds included the burble of the CLS's V8 as we dodged puddles, tasted wine and swatted mosquitoes.

While we may not have been able to test its performance qualities, it did have a number of attributes that came in handy on our trip – like its safety.

For one thing, its 18-inch wheels and tires kept the weighty vehicle firmly planted throughout a series of torrential downpours on the way to Pelee. The piercing headlights that swivel around corners helped us see through the sheet rain in the dark, narrowly missing a deer by the side of the road at one point.

There was also electronic stability control, and enough airbags to float across to the island like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We felt safe as houses, even at Hwy. 401 speed.

Of course, once on Pelee Island, there are different reasons to feel safe – like the lack of other people. Even though the population in the summer expands exponentially because of all the cottages for Canadians and Americans, there weren't many around on this early summer weekend.

"We're an accordion," said Tiessen. "We bubble up to close to 2,000 on some weekends in the summer and fewer than 200 on any given day in January."

Given the solitude and isolation, the slower tempo of the island worked wonders on our frazzled nerves.

"It's not as desolate here as people might imagine," says Tiessen. "There can be great beauty in stillness."

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