Mercedes EQE review: No more fuelling around

The EQE is more than an electric car – it’s a way for Mercedes to separate you from S$404,888 and leave you glad. Just look at it, all sleek and polished, like something delicately sculpted by the hands of Aura, Greco-Roman goddess of the breeze.

Beyond that, the EQE is also meant to seduce you from your marriage to fossil fuel, never mind the irony that the brand’s three-pointed star originally signified that it built piston engines for machines on land, sea and in the air.

Come to think of it, the EQE is merely the latest of six models from the all-electric Mercedes-EQ label. Two more still are due ashore this year, so there will soon be an electric Mercedes for pretty much everyone (or at least, everyone who can afford one).

As you might have guessed from the name, the EQE is for people who have an eye on the E-Class, the favourite car of towkays here since forever. It’s not an ordinary car with its combustion bits ripped out and electric hardware slipped in, but something built from scratch to run on batteries.

For now you can choose between two versions, with a sporty EQE 43 for those whose idea of a good time is to lunge to 100 km/h in just 4.2 seconds, and the car on this page, the EQE 350+.

It’s slower, but hardly slow. Nail the accelerator and the Mercedes wafts silently to 100 in 6.4 seconds, which makes it as quick as a decent hot hatch. It makes a passable go at slinging around corners like one, too, with the balanced and stable attitude through bends that the best electric cars typify. 

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Yet, the EQE isn’t a car about sensations. If anything, it’s about the lack of them. It operates in a sort of eerie silence that makes it seem powered by witchcraft. Travelling in the vault-like cabin is an excellent way to seal yourself from the clamour of the outside world. The air suspension is firm so the ride occasionally gets busy, but the damping is excellent so things never get bouncy.

Inside, it’s somehow highly digital without making you feel like you’re under constant bombardment by photons from a billion pixels. That might be because the graphics all look beautiful, never assaulting the eye with garish icons.

Or perhaps it’s because the main 12.8-inch touchscreen and 12.3-inch driver display perch atop a dashboard covered in a lovely wood veneer, with marquetry that makes the whole thing look like the work of a master carpenter.

But if the interior has a standout feature, it’s how gorgeously the place is lit at night, with customisable lighting schemes that let you adjust the ambience to suit whatever mood you’re in, just as dimming the lights at home can help you relax.

Where the EQE departs from the Mercedes norm is how it’s shaped in the back. There is noticeably more rear legroom than in the E-Class, but the car’s streamlined shape impinges on headroom back there. The rear windscreen is positively tiny, too, which takes some getting used to.

At 430 litres, the boot isn’t particularly large, probably because an electric motor lives back there to drive the rear wheels. Welcome to the electric car norm of restricted rear visibility and lower cargo carrying capacity.

Still, study after study shows that people who make the jump to electric cars never want to go back to combustion power, so what’s a little boot space? Nor does the EQE require a big leap. A fairly hefty battery pack gives it the ability to easily cover 500 km, likely more. So much for range anxiety.

If you haven’t got somewhere to plug it in at home, the 50 kilowatt chargers that are pretty much everywhere around the island now would add a week’s worth of mileage in about an hour, so if a trip to the mall is part of your weekly routine, you could totally have a relationship with an EQE.

It’s likely to be an affectionate relationship, too. The EQE looks appealingly futuristic, offers brisk performance yet rolls around with satiny refinement, and its cabin is a haven of comfort. In just about every way, it feels like an upgrade over the E-Class, which set the combustion standard for decades.

Above all, it’s a beguiling car that presses all the emotional buttons you expect a Mercedes to hit. And while it does take some getting used to here and there, it leaves you with the sense that there is no turning back from owning one. Mercedes-EQ EQE 350+

Electric motor / layout Single / rear  Motor power/torque 292 hp/565 Nm Battery type /net capacity Lithium-ion/90.6 kWh Normal Charge Type / Time 11 kW AC / 7.4 hours Max Fast Charge Type / Time 170 kW DC / 32 mins 10 to 80 per cent Range 587 km (estimated)  0-100 km/h 6.4 seconds Top Speed 210 km/h Efficiency 18.4 kWh/100 km Agent Cycle & Carriage Price S$404,888 with COE Available Now