Mercedes EQS SUV: The Best Chauffeur-Driven SUV
The Mercedes-Benz EQS EV is available both as a sedan (click here to read my view) and an SUV. This review is for the latter1. The SUV further comes in two variants, the 400 and the 580. This review is for the 400, since it’s the only one offered for a test drive. So I test-drove it, both in the city and on the highway, and evaluated it against my requirements. And my conclusion is:
If you’re buying a car primarily to be driven by your driver, the EQS SUV offers an exceptional level of comfort, more than any crossover, SUV, MPV or hatchback I’ve ever driven.2 It’s an experience deserving of the word luxury.
If, on the other hand, you typically drive, this isn’t the best car for you — see the Self-drive section.
Comfort
The front passenger seat is the most comfortable one, the one from which to experience the car at its best. So this section is written with reference to this seat.
- I couldn’t stretch my legs fully even with the seat all the way back and down.
+ The headroom is impressive. I test headroom by putting my palm on my head, fingers spread out, with the thumb touching my head. In cramped cars, like sedans, I can’t spread my fingers much. In spacious cars like the Creta or the Ritz, I can, with my little finger against the roof. But in the Mercedes, I couldn’t even touch the roof! This kind of immense space makes it amazingly luxurious.
+ The headrest and neck pillow are the best I ever experienced in any car.
+ The car changes bumps in the roads into a pleasant, undulating motion. It’s like a gentle swing, except that it’s vertical. I was floating above the road, free of its problems, insulated in my own bubble of happiness, surrounded by high-quality and tasteful decor.
+ The seat is more comfortable than my sofa at home!
+ The noise isolation is stellar, better than any other car I’ve driven. When I was on one of the worst stretches of Bangalore road3, the noise of the road seemed distant, as if I was 200 feet away from the road.
- The windshield is not panoramic, given the high dash and the low seat position that’s often comfortable for the front passenger seat. Neither is the window panoramic, since the B-pillar intrudes into my field of view. Considering both these factors, it feels a little closed.
+ The floating center console gives you an additional storage area. It’s hard to reach, but it’s better than not having it at all.
+ When unlocked, door handles pop out. So you know whether it’s locked without having to try and see.
- 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.
- When the car starts moving, 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 car 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.
Adjustments
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.
Safety problem and bugs
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 needed4. The ADAS can’t be turned off5. Defective ADAS that can’t be turned off is more dangerous than not having it.
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 1.7 crore rupee car!
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
+ 2 USB-C ports.
+ CarPlay works on either of the two USB-C ports. This is the first car in which I’ve seen this, and eliminates even the smallest inconvenience, thanks to Mercedes going the extra mile and designing the SUV thoughtfully.
+ There are two more USB-C ports in the center console, and two more below the floating center console. One thing you won’t be short of in this car is charging — you’ll be able to charge your phones, tablet, laptop, camera, power bank…
- 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 70 lakhs, not 1.7 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
+ The door holds a 1-liter Bisleri bottle and a Thermos of similar size6. The center console holds two more bottles, though unfortunately they rattle as the car accelerates and decelerates.
+ The AC vents are high, which is good, since I want the AC on my face and upper body, the most heat-sensitive parts of the body.
+ The seat is ventilated.
+ The sunroof is big, but not panoramic. It has a big center bar. The half in front opens. The half behind doesn’t and is therefore a moonroof. Each half is sizable by itself, bigger than the entire sunroof of (say) the Verna.
- 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.
- No cooled glove box.
+ Each of the four occupants can independently choose whether they want the AC on their lower body, upper body, or both.
- No physical AC controls, which increases the risk of an accident.
Rear seat
+ Recline and front / back adjustment, both electric.
- 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 dual-function recline control, rather than reuse the multi-adjustment control from the front with only 2 of them working. This is a lazy shortcut on their part, not acceptable in a 1.7-crore vehicle.
- I couldn’t stretch my legs fully.
- Insufficient headroom, as is common in the rear seat, but isn’t acceptable at 1.7 crores.
- You can’t move the front seat forward from the rear seat, when the front seat is empty and you want more space.
- The window isn’t panoramic because of the quarter glass.
± In the center armrest is a Samsung tablet to use as a controller. I can’t tell if it’s any good, because it wasn’t provided in the test drive vehicle. This is in addition to the seat-back tablet and the physical AC controls at the center. Mercedes just threw tablets everywhere without making them work well. Quantity over quality.
Cooling:
+ 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.
+ My Thermos flask fits in the door.
- It shows the outside PM, but it fluctuates from 130 to 36 in seconds. This makes it useless. Besides, it shows 36 as unhealthy, which it’s not. Mercedes is lying to exaggerate the effectiveness of its air filtration.
+ Both rear passengers can independently adjust their vent up / down and left / right, set the temperature, toggle auto mode in the AC and set the fan speed. They can do these via the dedicated controls or the seatback tablet.
- The seat isn’t ventilated, only heated!
- The sunroof isn’t satisfying because of the center bar.
- No rear window sunshades. You can buy them as an accessory, which the salesman says are better than Amazon ones because they’re shaped to fit the window. But they’re still not as good as built-in ones like in the Creta because you have to put them on the seat when you’re not using them, and you can get them mixed up.
Electric
+ 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.
+ The car has a range of 263 km at high speed.
For self-drive
- 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.
- The acceleration isn’t as good as the Volvo EC40. It’s not the most fun car to drive.
- I’d recommend the EC40 or the Verna depending on whether fun or comfort is the higher priority.
- The driver’s seat has the same adjustments as the front passenger’s.
+ 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.
- 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.
+ Steering wheel tilts and telescopes.
- The horn can’t be pressed with one finger, as I’m used to. It’s among the worst in this regard.
- The dashboard shows a map provided my Map My India, which is a worse service than Google Maps.
+ 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.
To summarise, if you’re buying a chauffeur-driven car, the EQS SUV offers an exceptional level of comfort, more than any crossover, SUV, MPV or hatchback I’ve ever driven. It’s an experience deserving of the word luxury. For self-drive, I’d recommend the EC40 or the Verna depending on whether fun or comfort is the higher priority.
Which is actually a crossover, since it’s monocoque / unibody.
And more than any sedan, once you account for the increased body roll of the SUV, making it less comfortable to drive fast on a curved road or change lanes quickly at speed.
Tin Factory.
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.
You 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.
But approximately 450 ml capacity.