The Mercedes-AMG EQS: range anxiety in a 2.65-tonne rocket ship, anyone?

It’s a $330K luxury barge that hits 100km/h in 3.8 seconds. But the Mercedes EQS hinted at its dark side from the start.

Big-boned: the Mercedes-AMG EQS 53 4Matic+

Are malevolent machines a reality or just well-worn fiction? Anyone who ever tried to change the toner in a photocopier in the 1990s, or carefully programmed a VCR in the 1980s only to find that it had not, in fact, recorded Live Aid, knows the answer. What I’m increasingly noticing is that the cruelty of modern machines these days is far more cerebral, and somehow meaner.

This is not anti-German sentiment (I think it’s pure coincidence that they have a word for it) but I swear the Mercedes EQS – which is to EVs what the Space Shuttle was to planes – I bravely drove from Sydney to Canberra and back was experiencing schadenfreude as I squirmed and squinted in mathematical suffering.

Inside the cabin

The big Benz (it’s a whopping 5.2m long; a LandCruiser is 4.9m) had hinted at its dark side from the start. Most cars make an annoying beep, chirp or trill when you lock or unlock them, but the EQS makes a bassy, electric hum-boom, closely modelled on the sound stars make when they explode in a galaxy far, far away. It made me jump the first time, and after that I enjoyed walking some distance away from it in quiet car parks and watching it freak out strangers.

There are similar menacing hums when you start it up, accompanied by lots of Dark Side red glowing graphics that flow across its absurdly large screens – driver and passenger get a 31cm one each, plus there’s a whopping 45cm central screen. No wonder my daughter loved this car.

All this pulsing, rage-red anger is no doubt down to the fact that this EQS wears an AMG badge, which means that some German engineers who’ve spent their lives – and ruined their hearing – building lovely, loud V8s were allowed to fettle the performance of this enormous EV limousine. Which is also a bit weird. I mean, an EV actually makes sense when it’s a luxury car with the kind of legroom in the rear that a giraffe would call ample – a vehicle built for cruising in comfort and peerless silence. But this Mercedes-AMG EQS 53 4Matic+ has a Sport mode that turns it into a Saturn V rocket as it harnesses its significant 484kW and a whopping 950Nm of torque to launch itself to 100km/h in 3.8 seconds.

Honestly, when you look at the size of it, and get a sense of its 2.65-tonne mass by sitting in it, that just doesn’t seem plausible – indeed, a Canberra friend of mine point-blank didn’t believe me, so I took him out and showed him, which may not have been the best use of my precious battery power, but did make him shriek.

The EQS is amusing, then, it has a cosseting ride and it is luxurious – and perhaps that’s why I chose it to test whether I could drive an EV from Sydney to Canberra and back, a journey of 580km.

On the road

I fully charged the car the night before, and had 498km of range (the claimed maximum is 511km), which had dropped to 487km by morning (cold weather doesn’t help). My plan was to stop in the gorgeous city of my birth, Goulburn, and top up at a fast charger, giving me enough volts to get home. I must admit this made me genuinely anxious all the way there – what would I do if there were no chargers available, or if the stories I’d heard about them being constantly broken were true?

Worse still, I’d somehow lost 230km of range by the time I got to Goulburn, despite only driving 200km, so my maths was wobbling. Fortunately there was a charger free, and it was stunningly fast, adding back 200km of range in just a 21-minute Happy Meal stop.

Unfortunately, by the time I set off for the return journey from Canberra, the car was telling me I had 280km to go and just 312km of range. Considering the variance on the way down, this had me hugely concerned and pondering whether there were any chargers at the edge of Sydney (I know of none). I started coasting down hills, rejoicing at every gained kilometre of range.

Styling on the rear end

The car’s “predictive range algorithm” continued to torment me with the statistical possibility of being stranded, and then, the closer I got to Sydney, it started piling on range, quietly chuckling at its own evil genius (apparently it errs on the side of caution, but I know schadenfreude when I see it). I arrived home a sweaty mess, with an indicated 105km of range left. That’s just mean.

What irked me most about the trip, I must admit, is just how few and far between chargers were. I had expected Canberra to be fairly bristling with them, but it was nothing like Paris, where I recently saw a dozen EVs plugged into kerbside chargers in the middle of town. (I know, “Canberra not like Paris – Shock!”)

Obviously, a petrol-powered Benz S-Class would get me to Canberra and back without refuelling, but it’s also obvious that anyone who can spend $328,400 on an EQS has a whole fleet of cars for longer journeys. And if they’re going to invest in a virtue-signalling vehicle, they’d like one large enough to be seen from space.

Mercedes-AMG EQS 53 4Matic+

ENGINE: Twin synchronous permanent magnet motors, 107.8kWh lithium-ion battery (484kW/950Nm)

ECONOMY: 21.1-24.3kWh/100km

TRANSMISSION: Single-speed automatic, all-wheel drive

PRICE: $328,400
STARS: 4 out of 5