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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. We'll see.
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 litres of storage space, the boot is biggish but not exceptionally so.
How does the EQC perform on the road?
The car’s driving experience has no shortage of
features to
distinguish it from a combustion-engined SUV, and, if you've read about or driven EVs before, you won’t need me to itemize most of them. But if there’s one to lift it above that of the E-tron, iPace
or
Tesla Model X
, it’s refinement.
Aren’t all EV 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, or course, but road noise is very well isolated here too, and the car’s ride is very comfortable indeed at both low speeds and high.
Throttle response is typically great, although perhaps not at
Tesla
’s almost synaptic level; drivability is excellent; and outright performance is very strong, though a Jaguar i-Pace might just feel a touch stronger under big pedal applications. The car’s handling, meanwhile, is neat, secure, contained and predictable, although it doesn’t stand out from the SUV pack for its sense of 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 different 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 setting (‘Comfort’, with just enough regen on a trailing throttle to make the car feel intuitive). Depart from this, however, and 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 work well about 80 per cent of the time – but it certainly has moments 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 - and most obviously via a haptic accelerator that creates perceptible lumps in the pedal's travel with which to guide your inputs. It does all this in order to eke out battery range, and, operating
thusly
, the EQC’s electronics must be processing gigabytes of sensor data, minute by minute, in order to effectively be entirely responsible for the car's 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 my sense of control over the car around town, rather than enhancing it.
Otherwise, judged as a taste of things to come from the EQ sub-brand, 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 I'd say that ought to be fine for the rest of us as well –
as long as Mercedes continues
to make it easy enough to find the ‘off’ button.
