The Made In India Mercedes-Benz Electric Flagship Is Truly Special

The locally made Mercedes-Benz EQS 580 4Matic is a marvel of technology, performance, luxury, and most importantly, range

- Afzal Rawuther

Headline numbers matter a great deal when it comes to automobiles, particularly so with EVs. With the Mercedes-Benz EQS 580 4Matic, these numbers are truly remarkable 857km of ARAI-certified range, a O-100kmph time of 4.3 seconds, a 107.8kWh battery, and the ability to be topped up with a 200kW charger. Any of these numbers in isolation would have been impressive, but all that together and we have an automobile that is certainly worthy of your attention.

With the launch of the EQS, India becomes the only country outside Germany where Mercedes-Benz’ electric flagship is assembled. The AMG variant of Merc’s top-of-the-line electric sedan, with much of the same hardware, is a staggeringly quick sedan. The EQS 580 is built on the same all-electric platform as the EQS 53 4Matic+. Being assembled locally makes it cheaper by nearly Rs 90 lakh when compared to the fully imported AMG variant. It even manages to undercut its ICE sibling, the S-Class, by Rs 5 lakh due to a lower 5 percent GST rate as opposed to the 28 percent for the S-Class. With the lower taxation on EVs, the EQS 580 will turn out to be an easy Rs 30 lakh cheaper on-road when compared to the S-Class.

At first glance, it has to be said that the EQS doesn’t look like any other MercedesBenz. The classic three box shape has given way to a monobox’ design, which makes it stand out in a crowd. It gives the car a coupe-like shape. Mercedes-Benz claims that this has helped it achieve a drag coefficient of 0.20, the lowest for any production car in the world interestingly, the EQS 53 has a Cd of 0.23).