Mercedes EQA review: Have you seen delight?

Singapore

IMAGINE waking up in a robot's body. You now run on batteries, so you no longer eat food grown at huge environmental cost. Instead, once a week you plug a cord into yourself to recharge overnight (I'll let you decide where you think the port should be). Meanwhile, hot emissions that you try to hide from your wife under the blanket are a thing of the past.

The Mercedes EQA 250 is a bit like that. It's like someone took the smallest Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle and waved a magic wand over it to banish its oily, hydrocarbon-guzzling bits to the past.

That is sort of what happened. The second car to wear the all-electric Mercedes-EQ label, the EQA is heavily based on the GLA, only instead of an engine, gearbox and fuel tank, it has batteries and a 190 horsepower motor to drive the front wheels.

The result is almost disorienting, because the EQA looks like a Mercedes and feels like one, but it drives like it came from the spirit world.

Even for an electric car the EQA is eerily hushed, the humming and whirring of its motor as heavily suppressed as the noise of the outside world trying to penetrate the cabin. It rolls along with a certain gravitas as well, maybe because it weighs more than two tonnes, but when the moment for a quick overtake arrives, it jumps into action without hesitation.

Electric cars are like that anyway because motors deliver their torque instantly, so in the time it takes for a combustion car to drop a couple of gears, the Mercedes gallops ahead by several lengths.

190 horsepower isn't enough to inspire terror in a driver, but the EQA's day-to-day acceleration is lovely to experience. As a car, it's quieter than an assassin, and it has the ability to strike suddenly like one.

You do feel its weight around bends, though. It's not that the EQA is incapable of making it through a corner quickly, but you're left feeling that it would prefer not to be rushed. On the plus side, while the suspension is predictably firm, things are so much calmer over bumps than in the GLA, which sometimes feels like someone poured concrete inside the shock absorbers and allowed it to set.

Inside the EQA is where things are more familiar. It still has a gear lever, and it has the same dashboard and controls as a GLA. The AMG Line package of cosmetic frills (which costs S$18,000) does add sporty red stitches, aluminium pedals, a synthetic upholstery called Artico and various other upgrades, but by and large what's nice about the EQA's cabin was already there in the GLA: the twin-screen interface with its beautiful graphics and the 64-colour ambient lighting that makes the interior so alluring to look at once twilight sets in.

Mind you, the electric hardware does impose on the cabin in ways. Because the batteries live under the floor, rear passengers have no well for their feet, so the seating back there has an economy class feel to it, even though it isn't all that tight for space.

The EQA's boot is small, too, at 340 litres, though the rear seats fold down if you need more.

That's not to say the EQA feels like a car that was hastily converted from petrol power to electric drive. Claudius Steinhoff, the chief executive officer of Daimler South East Asia, says the product department at Mercedes planned a battery-powered version of the baby SUV from the start, and he ought to know, because he used to work there.

"When the engineers started to think about this platform back then they already had the electric vehicle in mind," he tells The Business Times.

That might be why it's surprisingly competitive on range, despite having a battery pack that, at 66.5kWh in capacity, isn't huge. Yet, the EQA can apparently cover up to 426km on a single charge. That would definitely require a bit of saintliness behind the wheel, so ordinary folk ought to lop 50km off the figure to be safe. As it turns out, BT covered 202km and returned the EQA with 173km remaining in the battery, for a predicted range of 375km.

That's enough to last most drivers here more than a week, but if you're curious about the car's charging needs, an 11kW wallbox gets the EQA from empty to full in about six hours. Faster DC charging, like the kind more and more shopping malls have, can fill the battery halfway in roughly half an hour. I've spent more time than that in the toilet, to be honest.

One of the things that helps the EQA get the most out of each charge is a setting called D-Auto. Electric cars can put energy back into the battery when they slow down, using regenerative braking, but sometimes it's more efficient to just freewheel along instead. The problem is, when should you do what?

The Mercedes can figure it out by itself, using radar to scan the road ahead. If it sees a vehicle in front of you it turns up the regenerative braking so you don't crash into it, but if it's all clear, the EQA's motor puts its feet up when you put your right foot up.

It's slightly weird at first and does take some getting used to, but it feels like a smart feature that smart people came up with, so who am I to ignore it?

Of all the car's EV-specific features, though, my favourite is possibly the one that lets you pre-cool the cabin, either by punching your departure time into the infotainment system, or simply when you unlock the doors. Doing so gets the air-con going before you slip into the car, and soon any car that can't do the same trick is going to feel awfully primitive.

If those things help the EQA feel sophisticated, it at least looks the part, too. There's no mistaking this for a GLA because, as per the Mercedes-EQ norm, it has a glossy black panel in place of a front grille. Above that is a striking light bar that stretches across the front, a feature that's mirrored at the rear with a slender red LED strip that spans the width of the car.

The EQA does retain the basic elegance of Mercedes' current cars, but the lighting features make it an eye-catching thing. That might be extra relevant here, because one reason for switching to an electric car is to signal how progressive, tech-savvy and eco-conscious you are, though at S$250,888 with Certificate Of Entitlement for the AMG Line version, it's an expensive signal to make.

Tesla fans are doubtless howling at the price because you can buy something from the American carmaker for much less money, but the EQA 250 is very clearly a Mercedes first and an electric car second.

Besides, the electric revolution has room for lots of players, at least according to Daimler's Steinhoff. "We are very happy having Tesla now here on the ground, because it's another competitor making the game even more interesting," he says. Very likely, he recognises that Tesla's entry has done much to turn people on to the idea of going electric in the first place.

Whatever the case, the EQA at least reveals how electric drive is simply at a point where it's superior to combustion technology. Compare it with a GLA, and it reveals how adding batteries and a motor to a Mercedes can turn into a better Mercedes.

Above all, if the EQA's lighting strips help it to turn heads, its electric powertrain has the ability to turn minds.

Mercedes-Benz EQA 250 AMG Line

Electric motor 190hp, 375Nm Battery Lithium ion, 66.5kWh (net) Charge time / Type 6 hrs / 11kW wallbox, 1 hr (0-80%) / 50kW DC charger Electric range "Up to" 426km 0-100km/h 8.9 seconds Top speed 160km/h Efficiency 16.2kWh/100km Agent Cycle & Carriage Price S$250,888 with COE Available Now