Mercedes used a solid-state battery car to (almost) break the EV range record

Someone at Mercedes is getting really tired of complaints about range anxiety. Last week it used the GT XX concept car to smash all sorts of nerdy speed endurance records like ‘how far can you drive an EV in 24 hours?’. Now it’s broken the EV endurance record for a solid-state battery.

Yep, solid states. The supposedly lighter, more power-dense cells which charge faster and will make our EVs nimbler to drive and more economical. Some say they’re the technology of the future and always will be. But Mercedes says different.

It stuffed a solid-state battery into an otherwise production-spec EQS saloon and set off for a drive. The drive took it from Stuttgart in Germany to Malmö in Sweden – a distance of some 1,205km (748 miles) – without any recharging. And when it arrived, the EQS was apparently still showing 137km of range.

Where the regular EQS has a monster 118kWh (useable) lithium-ion battery, Mercedes says the solid-state prototype’s battery pack is comparable in size and weight (boo) but offers 25 per cent more energy content (woo). It’s air-cooled, which saves the weight and power drain of liquid cooling systems, and Mercedes says the tech is being co-developed by its road car division and the UK-based AMG F1 team.

And this isn’t just a show-off stunt. Mercedes insists tests like this keep it on-track to produce a showroom-ready solid-state EV you can actually buy by the end of this decade.

One thing we can’t figure out is… why not drive it a bit further? Y’see, while it beat the Merc EQXX concept car’s record of 1,202km on one charge (from Stuttgart to Silverstone), the EQS prototype only equalled the Guinness-certified world record for a no-recharge EV trip, which stands (obviously) at 1,205km in a Lucid Air. 

So yes, very clever, well done Mercedes. But if you had so much electric left in the tank, why didn’t you just go round the block a few more times?