Mercedes EQS Sedan: Unsuitable for India

The Mercedes-Benz EQS EV is available both as a sedan and an SUV. This review is for the former. I test-drove it, both in the city and on the highway, and evaluated it against my requirements. I wouldn’t recommend it, since it’s unsuitable for India:

It scrapes speed bumps. So I slowed down to 3 kph, but it still did. The salesman told me to drive diagonally over it, so I did, into the oncoming lane, but it still scraped. That happened over the next speed bump, too. The car has underbody protection, which the salesman said will get damaged over time as it scrapes.

Further, the car is excessively long at 5.3 meters. It was hard to U-turn, and hard to drive in traffic. I couldn’t easily go through gaps as I could with reasonably-sized cars like the Verna or Windsor. I couldn’t drive at ease the way I could in either of these cars. In the Verna, I was reclining, chilling, with my right hand on my right thigh holding the wheel with barely two fingers, and comfortably driving at speed in a dark, unfamiliar road at night in traffic. I was never at ease to that extent in the Mercedes.

At one point, when the car in front of me some distance away abruptly stopped, the Forward Collision Avoidance system slammed on the brakes, instantly decelerating from 30 to 0, stopping with maybe 2 car lengths gap between my car and the car in front. I was unnerved, and a motorist in the adjacent lane stopped to glare at me, as if to say, “What the hell are you doing?” If there was someone behind me, I’d likely have been rear-ended, but thankfully there wasn’t. Without ADAS, I’d have braked strongly but not 100%, stopping safely in advance of the car in front, but not with so much gap. You should never slam on the brakes when it’s not needed¹. The ADAS can’t be turned off². Defective ADAS that can’t be turned off is more dangerous than not having it. Besides, when braking hard, whether manually or because of ADAS, the brake shudders. It’s unnerving and feels like something has gone wrong.

Even when the ADAS isn’t risking an accident, it beeps loudly and annoyingly for every small thing, such as a two-wheeler driving by slowly when my car is stopped in traffic. This adds rather than reduces stress. Driving in Bangalore is already stressful, and I don’t want my car to add to it.

Further, the car announced on multiple occasions, “Caution: sharp curve in 300m”. On one occasion, it was indeed a sharp curve, but I’m familiar with that road, and it would have been less stressful if it announced the same thing without the word “Caution”. Besides, two of these three warnings were wrong. Again, software that tries to be over smart is more annoying than helpful.

At one point, the AC kept blowing air without cooling it, despite the controls being set for cooling. The salesman verified the controls, and he didn’t have any clue why this was happening. I suggested stopping, turning the car off, and then on again, which fixed this. An unreliable AC is unacceptable in a 1.9 crore rupee car!

The sedan comes with white seats and white carpets, both of which were already dirty in the test drive vehicles. If Mercedes can’t maintain their own vehicles, I certainly can’t, since I have fewer staff.

Considering all the above, the car is not designed for India, so don’t buy it, let alone for its price of 1.9 crooooore!

If you’d like to know more, keep reading:

± The steering wheel is big.

Comfort

The seat offers many electrical adjustments:

+ Front / back

+ Recline

+ Up / down

+ Thigh angle

+ Thigh extension

(The above are commonly referred to as 8-way adjustment.)

+ Lumbar more and less, and up / down

(“12-way adjustment”)

+ Side bolsters (these extend forward from the seat preventing you from sliding to a side). They make me feel safe and comfortable at the same time. This is notable: safety restraints like seatbelts typically make me feel less comfortable, not more.

+ Headrest up / down

+ Headrest front / back — this is the only manual adjustment among all these.

+ Steering wheel tilts and telescopes.

- I can’t drive the car with the seat all the way up, because the huge header bar is taking up too much of my view, and the headroom is terrible. I have to lower the seat.

+ If the seat is lowered and slid back all the way, there’s so much legroom that I had to move the seat closer to the pedals to reach them comfortably, even as someone who’s 5'11" and has long legs! It’s amazing to have so much legroom in a car, more than I need. It’s a luxury.

+ Once I adjusted the seat height to somewhere in the middle, the headroom was fine (for a sedan) and so was the legroom and it was comfortable all around.

- The windshield is small and it feels cramped, because the dash is chin-level!

- When I start driving, the seat belt retracts electrically, ensuring there’s no slack. This is important for safety, but the car overdoes it, making it too tight and uncomfortable. By contrast, in my Ritz, the retraction is mechanical (caused by the elastic action), not electrical. It retracts to the right amount, removing slack but causing no discomfort. The belt loop doesn’t have too much friction, so if the bottom half of the belt (the part above across my lap) has slack and the top half (the part across my chest) doesn’t, the slack gets distributed to the top naturally, at which point the elastic mechanism removes it. It’s a simple mechanical system that works better than the EQS’s electrical one. Overengineering can make things worse.

- The horn can’t be pressed with one finger, as I’m used to. It’s among the worst in this regard.

- The inner rear view is cramped, since the rear windshield is cramped.

- Regenerates when coasting, which results in the car slowing down, eventually requiring you to accelerate. These deceleration / acceleration cycles are less comfortable than coasting without regen.

- The brake pedal requires a heavy press and has a lot of travel. I’ve driven cars that had one or the other, but combined, it’s effortful, not easy.

+ Accelerates to its maximum speed effortlessly.

- The dashboard shows a map provided my Map My India, which is a worse service than Google Maps.

+ Unlike most cars where the windshield is more vertical than the bonnet, with the EQS, the windshield continues the curve of the bonnet. It looks aerodynamic and impressive, curved everywhere — bonnet, windshield, roof and fastback. My first reaction was “wow”. Photos don’t do it justice. The EQS sedan has the second lowest drag coefficient of 0.2 of any vehicle. Unfortunately, it was uncomfortable from inside, as if the windshield is falling on me.

+ The car comes with a frameless door, where there’s no metal above the window glass when you open. It looks unique and nice, but eliminates a place to hold on to or to push the door closed or pull it open from the outside. I’ll take usability over esthetics any day of the week.

+ When unlocked, door handles pop out. So you know whether it’s locked without having to try and see.

Electric

+ Thanks to its dual motors, flooring it in sport causes weight transfer to the extent that you feel the front lift up. Not that it loses contact with the road, but that it’s angled up, like a plane taking off. Further, a lot of my weight is on my back. This is a completely new experience for me. I’m used to most of my weight on my seat and little on my back!

+ The car fast-charges at 200 KW, but there are only 5 such chargers in all of India!

So it will take you much longer than the 32 minutes Mercedes claims for 10-80% fast charging.

Digital

+ The interior is futuristic, with three screens in the front: the dash, the center infotainment screen, and a dedicated screen for the front passenger. Mercedes claims it’s a 58-inch screen, which is a lie: you can’t display anything between the screens, or a 2.39:1 movie across two screens.

± The infotainment screen is at an angle, and the entire area around it feels curved and organic. Mercedes calls it a waterfall display. It indeed looks like the dash is falling down a curve into the center console.

- Even a single touch near a screen left a visible fingerprint. I’d rather have something that looks worse but is lower-maintenance, because that will actually look better in day to day use.

+ Wired CarPlay

+ Beautiful 13-inch screen. I can see both the overall route and my vicinity — “Which road should I take here? When should I turn next?” — at the same time. This is better than many car screens, which are small so you have to keep tapping the Route button in Google Maps to toggle between the map around you and the overall route. The screen is bright and saturated even through sunglasses.

- The steering volume control is a touch strip that’s hard to precisely control. Music is either too loud or too soft. When I was on a call, I gave up trying to adjust it and continued with the call putting up with the person’s voice louder than is comfortable.

- The phone’s volume buttons don’t work in CarPlay.

- Each of the three passengers has a dedicated tablet-sized screen. I tried a voice search but it said “Not subscribed.” Voice search has been a free and basic feature on tablets for more than a decade. It’s not acceptable to charge for that, any more than it’s acceptable to charge me each time I open a new tab or open the car door. Besides, the entire point of a luxury car is that you pay an obscene amount of money to get all kinds of benefits that other cars don’t have. Why, again, should you pay again? It’s like a restaurant adding a “chair fee” to sit on a chair, a “table fee” for the table, and an “AC fee”. And if I’m paying again, I’d be willing to pay 90 lakhs, not 1.9 cr, for the car. Don’t double dip, Mercedes.

- The tablet has a maps app, so I searched for my home, and it doesn’t tell me if I have enough battery to reach home. Then I’d rather use Google Maps on my phone for a better experience.

- Unfortunately, you can’t use the tablet as an external monitor for your laptop, since it has only a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

- I wanted to watch a Youtube video on the tablet, but it’s crippled and can’t do that, unless I buy yet another thing, this time a Fire TV Stick. There should be no reason to buy hardware to do what software can do. If the seat-back TV can’t play Youtube, that makes it defective, and it should be fixed, rather than having a band-aid of a Fire TV Stick. A separate device bring more unnecessary complexity, cost and e-waste.

- I wouldn’t be surprised if buying an 11-inch iPad Pro and taking it with you to use in the car results in a better experience.

Cooling

- No sunglass holder

+ Ventilated seats

- No cooled glove box

- No rear window sunshades

+ Sunroof

- The sunroof is translucent — I can see the outline of a building through it. Shadows of leaves from trees above whizz past, which is distracting, since it’s in my field of view. I could feel heat radiating down at my head, which is the most heat-sensitive part of the body. The sunroof was warm to the touch. In India, given how hot our summers are, this is a defective sunroof, and worse than not having a sunroof at all.

- At one point in the drive, the sunroof opened by itself, without anyone’s hand being near the control! This was presumably because of a bug in the car’s software.

+ The AC vent looks cool, like a jet engine. In fact, the salesman says it’s inspired by it.

+ One bottle holder in the door and two in the center.

+ The car has a floating center console, which unlocks the bottom shelf for additional storage. It’s not safe to access when driving, but it’s better than not having a bottom shelf at all.

- No physical AC controls, which increases the risk of an accident.

Esthetics

± The car comes in two variants, with only esthetic differences and a similar price.

+ Fastback body style, which looks so streamlined and elegant compared to a SUV or sedan rear, both of which have sharp angles.

Front passenger seat

+ I can stretch my legs.

+ Good headroom.

+ The view through the windshield is good since the seat is low, as front passenger seats tend to be.

+ It supports all the same adjustments as the driver’s.

- The window isn’t panoramic, since the thick B-pillar intrudes into my field of view.

+ Traveling in this seat is wonderful: it feels like I’m floating above the road.

? The front passenger gets a dedicated screen, but I didn’t explore it.

Rear seat

- I couldn’t stretch my legs fully.

- The headroom is fine for a sedan.

+ Electrical recline.

- The same controls for seat adjustment from the front are used, except that most of the buttons are non-functional. This is confusing — I didn’t know which controls work, and which don’t. Mercedes should have built a single-function recline control, rather than reuse the multi-adjustment control from the front with only one of them working. This is a lazy shortcut on their part, not acceptable in a 1.9-crore vehicle.

- The window is not panoramic in either width or height. The height is low, because it’s a sedan. The width is good, but the quarter glass³ intrudes into my field of view, so it’s not panoramic width-wise.

Cooling:

+ I can choose whether I want the AC on my upper body, lower body, or both. Most cars offer this choice only in the front seats.

+ There are 3 AC vents: the typical center one, another in the B pillar and a third under the front seat with vents pointing backward.

+ I can store one Thermos flask in the door.

+ Ventilated seat

- The center armrest’s bottle holders require a double tap to open, which didn’t work. This is unnecessary use of technology. Imagine your commode required a double tap to flush, but the tap area weren’t marked. Why?

- The AC, even at max, required 10 min to cool, given the heat coming in through the poorly designed sunroof.

+ You can adjust the AC using regular controls for temperature, fan speed and auto toggle. Alternatively, you can use the tablet on the back of the front passenger seat.

1. Braking is a tradeoff between two risks: avoiding hitting the car in front, and avoid getting rear-ended yourself. The stronger you brake, the lesser the first risk is, but the greater the second.

2. It can, but it’s still active. Someone should teach Mercedes engineers what “off” means. If Mercedes made a stove, and you turned it off, your dish would still continue cooking.

3. The triangular part at the rear end of the window.