Mercedes-EQ EQS 450 SUV review: Mercedes goes big

The Mercedes-EQ EQS is the head of the electric Mercedes family, plain and simple. The flagship in Mercedes-Benz’s EV lineup, it’s available as both a sedan and an SUV, the latter of which is the order of the day. 

The EQ series is one of the foremost technological frontiers of the entire Mercedes company nowadays and the EQS is at the pointy end of that ship, much like how the S-Class has led the way for other car-related innovations.

The EQS seeks to marry the established standards of luxury with the technological advancements of the future. 

In SUV guise, the EQS has quite the footprint (physical, not carbon). It’s 1.7-metres tall, 2.1-metres wide, and over five-metres long.

Yet with, the curvaceous, smooth nature of the Mercedes-EQ design language, it looks friendlier and less aggressive than other large SUVs.

Those rounded panels all serve a purpose too, flirting with the air to make the EQS as aerodynamically efficient as possible, and it’s worked.

Despite the EQS’s size, the aerodynamic slip-n-slide of a body means that it has a drag coefficient of just 0.26, a highly impressive figure. 

The ride too, is beautifully smooth. The lack of an engine only further betters the quality of the drive, with no gear changes nor vibrations to shake you from your ivory tower.

Regardless of whether you’re the driver or one of the six lucky passengers (yes it’s a seven-seater), you’re just so well insulated from the outside world, serenely coccooned in your EQS-shaped bubble.

If anything, in comfort mode, the ride on the Airmatic air suspension is a bit too bouncy. I found myself preferring the level of damping in sport mode where the body would settle itself much quicker after a bump.

The drive itself, while dead quiet, still packs plenty of punch. The EQS SUV is fitted with two motors, one on each axle for all-wheel drive and a combined output of 360hp and 800Nm of torque. 

All that juice means that even though the EQS SUV tips the scales at an eye-watering 2.8 tons, you can still get yourself and all six passengers from zero to 100km/h in just six seconds. That is simply monstrous pace for something so equally monstrous in size.

To aid with manoeuvrability, the EQS SUV has up to 10 degrees of rear-wheel steering that can either tighten the turning radius or increase the stability at high speeds. 

However, 2.8 tons is a lot of weight and while monumental amounts of power and good chassis control can mask most of it, the laws of physics rear their ugly head when it comes to the matter of braking.

You notice very quickly that there is a lot of mass you’re attempting to arrest speed from and while its a good thing the brakes on the EQS SUV are correspondingly massive, it doesn’t help that the regenerative braking system actually pulls the pedal away from your foot which can make it a little disconcerting when you go to brake and the pedal isn’t where you left it. 

An upside of the regenerative braking though is that it helps to increase the range.

Thanks to the EQS SUV’s giant 108.4kWh battery pack, Mercedes says you’d be able to get 610km on a single charge with their claimed power consumption of 20.5kWh/100km.

During my testing, I managed to average 22.1kWh/100km but this was with lots of idling, several trips to and from the airport with loads of luggage in the 565 litre boot (expandable to over 2000 litres with the rear seats folded!!), and a healthy dose of hard accelerations. 

So considering that I still managed to get 455km of driving done with about 10 per cent battery left, with more sensible driving, I could easily get over 500km out of one full charge.

The EQS SUV is also rated for up to 200kW DC fast charging so if and when that ever comes to Singapore, you’d be able to juice up your electric land-yacht lickety split. 

While the driving experience is mighty impressive, the real star of the show is how it feels like on the inside because the EQS SUV has been absolutely loaded to the gills with tech and fancy features.

Screens are everywhere in this car, giant ones too. There’s not just the 17.7-inch centre display, there’s also the 12.3-inch driver’s display and more interestingly, the 12.3-inch display for the front passenger known as the Hyperscreen.

Through this screen, the passenger can adjust the music, seats, air-conditioning, or even connect their own Bluetooth headset to play their own music. 

Mercedes also retain their world championship title (declared by me) in ambient lighting with a setup that’s frankly getting a little overkill.

There is hardly a single surface that hasn’t been ambiently lit and I had to lower the brightness of it because at full blast, the lights across the dash were getting a little too taxing on my eyes. 

Luckily though, the EQS SUV has a host of other features that make life inside it very much not taxing on the body.

The front seats are giant lounge-chair-esque affairs and are both heated, cooled, and come with massage functions. Even the air-conditioning has been spruced up by a Hepa filter and fragrances to make the air inside the car clean and fresh. 

Occupants are also treated to one of the best sound systems ever fitted to a production car, the 15 speaker, 710 watt, Burmester 3D surround sound system with Dolby Atmos.

That’s a lot of words but essentially what it means is that until now, I’ve just been listening to music wrong.

With native support for Spatial Audio through Apple Music, listening to music in the EQS is a perplexingly good experience.

Frankly, I’ve been to concert venues that sound worse than the speakers in the EQS. Listening to normal Spotify through Apple CarPlay (which the EQS also has, Android Auto too) just sounds lacking after being spoiled by Dolby Atmos.

The EQS SUV then, is not for the plebeians like you and I, it is positioned and aimed at those among us who have bathtubs full of cash to swim around in Scrooge McDuck-style.

But for those more fortunate than us, they get to enjoy a true marvel of engineering courtesy of the brilliant minds over at Mercedes.

The rest of us will just have to wait for some of that engineering marvel to trickle down to the more affordable models in the range. 

ALSO READ: Mercedes-Benz GLC300 Coupe 4Matic review: Appealing misnomer

This article was first published in Motorist.