The V-Class is the open-plan automobile of choice, with plenty of room, comfort, and elegance. Is this also true for the new EQV with the electric motor? There’s a lot to say about this rock-crystal white EQV, but two things stand out in particular.
First, the typical gasoline filling flap on the driver’s side of the door pillar still opens and closes, but there are no nozzles for diesel or AdBlue behind it, nothing. Second, there’s the basic start. There are no hidden or crystal glass keys, no finger scanners, and no glitzy shift-by-wire glitz. No, simply insert the huge remote control key into the ignition lock, flip it around, and set the small automatic selector lever behind the steering wheel to “D.”
But not with a fierce push, but with meekness and suitable speed.
Finally, Mercedes installs a 150 kW (204 PS) electric motor with 362 Nm of torque over the front axle. The power is just 100 or 80 kW in the range-optimized drive programs E and E +, and a medium-length V-Class is a pretty heavy mode of transport.
The batteries are kept in a compartment beneath the vehicle’s floor. As a result, the EQV is either a luxury bus or a van with a storage capacity of 4,630 liters.
The new electric bus gets its power from a 700-pound subterranean 100-kilowatt-hour battery block. The curb weight is also rather high: 2,887 kg. In the test, a V 300 d took it up to 2.4 tons. We can readily see why an EQV takes 11.3 seconds to sprint from 0 to 100 km/h and accelerates slowly from the recommended pace.
If you have not booked an activation to 160 km/h for 183 euros, it is electrically capped at 140 km/h.
At such speeds, one should keep a careful check on the competent charging station finder in the navigation system, given the 3.25 square meters of frontal area, because such speeds greatly limit the already short range. Our measurements suggest a test consumption of 31 kWh, while the e-bus uses 25 kWh even when driving extremely cautiously. As a result, the range is realistically between 306 and 380 kilometers.
Is it good or bad? In this configuration, there are (yet) no equivalent cars. The Mercedes EQC, a heavyweight with equally thick batteries, is slightly higher at 34.9 kWh. Both the Audi e-tron Sportback 55 Quattro (33.8 kWh) and the Audi e-tron Sportback 55 Quattro (33.8 kWh) are substantially quicker with 300 kW system output.
Rossen Gargolov
Keyword: Mercedes EQV 300 in the Test