For a company that has built a reputation on technical innovation, Mercedes has been uncharacteristically slow to launch a series-production electric car. Now that it has, and the Mercedes EQC crossover SUV is finally with us, it couldn’t have picked a location for the international press launch better than Oslo for high lighting just how long it has dallied. Here, every other car you see is electric. If London was the same, you’d probably have to take it in turns to boil your kettle at 6.20pm on a weekday, after everyone in the city had arrived home and plugged in.
Because Mercedes is Mercedes – the oldest name in the car business and still the most revered around much of the world, and now the biggest-selling premium automotive brand in the world, too – it’s a big deal whenever it does anything for the first time. For accuracy’s sake, though, we’d better put ‘first’ in inverted commas: there has been a handful of electric cars from Smart already and an electric A-Class called the E-Cell that was ‘sold’ in very small numbers about 10 years ago. This, nonetheless, will be the first electric Mercedes that’ll be built in its hundreds of thousands.
At least, I think it’s a Mercedes. Because it’s the first car from the EQ sub-brand, the EQC looks a bit like a Mercedes (it’s closely related to the GLC and you can certainly see the resemblance), but it also looks a bit like a generic mid-sized
crossover SUV that, to these eyes at least, might have been en designed by Renault or Hyundai – or even Saab.
Is that a problem, I wonder, in a market in which design may be about to become a vitally important selling point? It might be, or maybe it’s just our present perspective talking. Either way, if people look at the EQC and fail to recognize it as a Mercedes until it’s close enough to see the star on the grille, as I fear they might, you wonder if it will really fulfill its potential.
The EQC is, in prospect, a mid-sized SUV that’s actually about 100mm longer than a GLC, although still only a five-seater. With slightly different electric motors mounted on each axle,
the car has electronically torque-vectored four-wheel drive: the front motor has a less tightly wound stator for better-operating efficiency, the rear motor a more tightly wound one for greater torque – and, when cruising, the EQC is driven almost exclusively by the front motor. Dig deep into the accelerator, though, and the car’s driving impetus shifts instantly towards the rear axle, with up to a combined 402bhp and 564lb ft on tap. That ’s a good portion more peak torque than is offered by either the Jaguar I-Pace or the Audi E-Tron, although the Jaguar is still quicker-
accelerating than the Mercedes, according to manufacturer claims. It’s in direct comparison with those two key rivals that so much about this car will be judged. The EQC splits the difference between them on both overall length and price. With an 80kWh battery, it has the least usable battery capacity of the three – and yet it beats the bigger, heavier Audi on WLTP-test-verified battery range (259 m I le s play s 2 49). On the inside, the car is a lot easier to recognize as a modern Mercedes than from without. The EQC’s cabin has the twin widescreen digital displays and button-crowded steering wheel spokes of so many modern Mercedes but mixes some fresh design details, some new ambient lighting features, some EV-specific display modes, and new-groove materials into the ambient mix. Our test car had slotted speaker grilles and natty-looking stylized air vents, both of which I liked, as well as a particularly soft and attractive synthetic dashboard, whose appearance I can only risk underselling by des ribbing as if it had been made out of recycled wetsuits. Occupant space up front feels pretty typical for a mid-sized SUV.
In the rear, you’re just a little more aware of being squeezed in between a raised cabin floor (under which the drive battery sits) and a roofline that ’s lowish by class standards. With 500 liters of storage space, the boot is biggish but not exceptionally so. The driving experience has no shortage of distinguishing features from that of a combustion-engined SUV and I dare say by now you don’t need me to itemize them – but if there’s one to lift it above that of the E-Tron, I-Pace or Tesla Model X, it’s refinement. Aren’t all EVs supposed to be silent-running? Well, no – it turns out they’re not. I don’t think I’ 've ever driven an electric car – or any car, come to think of it – as quiet as the EQC. Attentive aerodynamic body design helps to tune out wind intrusion at speed, but road noise is very well isolated here, too, and the car’s ride is very comfortable indeed at both low and high speeds.
Throttle response is typically great, although perhaps not at Tesla’s almost synaptic level; drivability is excellent; and outright performance is very strong, although an I-Pace might just feel a touch stronger under big pedal applications. The handling, meanwhile, is neat, secure, contained and predictable, but it doesn’t stand out from the SUV pack for its outright grip, precision or incisiveness.
Complexity may be the only significant turn-off about the EQC’s motive character: there’s a lot of it and Mercedes hasn’t really attempted to mask any of it. The car has five driving modes (Comfort, Sport, Eco, Individual and Maximum Range) and five battery regeneration programs (which you select using what would otherwise be the gearshift paddles).
To give Mercedes due credit, you can get on just fine with the car in its default settings (Comfort, with just enough regen on a trailing throttle to make the car feel intuitive). Depart from there, however, an nd it may be a while before you’re sure you’ve found the dynamic presets you like best; and you’re quite likely to find a few you really don’t like in the process. Mercedes’ Auto regeneration mode, for example, uses the car’s speed limit detection, radar cruise control, and navigation systems to blend the regenerative braking of its electric motors up and down automatically. It seems to works well about 80% of the time – but it certainly has lapses of inattention. Combine that regen mode with Maximum Range driving mode, though, and the car goes into a semi-autonomous setting that restricts motor power both directly and indirectly (most obviously via a haptic accelerator that puts perceptible lumps into the pedal travel by which to guide your inputs). It does all this to eke out battery range; and thus operating, the EQC’s electronics must be processing terabytes of sensor data, minute by minute, in order to effectively be entirely responsible for its own speeding up and slowing down. To this tester, however, the mode was much too intrusive to feel like a driver support system and much more often tended to slightly undermine your sense of control over the car around town rather than enhancing it. Suffice it to say, I think you’d quickly learn to leave the EQC’s ‘cleverest’ technological tricks well enough alone except in certain places and conditions. Find a mode in which you can drive the car confidently, by contrast, and it could hardly be more relaxing, pleasant or easy-going.
As not just a car but a taste of things to come from the EQ sub-brand, then, the EQC suggests Mercedes won’t be shy about chasing after Tesla in more ways than one – or of taking risks with autonomous driving functionality in order to make a few waves. These will clearly be cars for technophiles as well as EV lovers; and that ought to be fine for the rest of us, too – so long as Mercedes cont I need to make it easy enough to find the ‘off’ button.
MATT SAUNDERS
@thedarkstormy1
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