Mercedes EQE 300 - long-term review

The EQE has departed. I’m afraid I’m not going to miss it. I came to admire the engineering but never warmed to the car.

Let’s start with the stuff it does well. It’s handsome inside, well made from lovely materials, has good storage and is logical to use. Even the central screen. I can’t think of a quieter, calmer car at speed. On a smooth motorway, the kind you don’t really find in the UK, it is superb, the long wheelbase and heavy weight lending it wonderful gliding manners. The Burmester sound system is the best I’ve had in one of my long-termers since the Naim system in the Conti GT.

This all made it a very good cruiser – or would have done if the seats were softer, enveloped and cosseted you. Instead you sat on them a bit primly. But I never got back ache, was always happy to do more distance. Which meant I could easily outlast the car. The furthest I got on a charge of the 89kWh battery was 227 miles, after which it took 88.2kWh. Yeah, I’d edged down to 1 per cent charge remaining.

Mercedes claims a range of 337 miles. As ever, knock a third off. Ignore the maximum theoretical range that shows up on the dash – it doesn’t take into account the fact its hilly and four degrees outside, but instead appears to assume it’s in a warm, cosy lab. Pointless. The best efficiency I got was 2.88mpkWh by doing 65-70mph on a clear motorway. In summer I suspect that would edge up to 3.3. Because despite all the good work done creating a drag factor of 0.24Cd, when we weighed it this EQE was 2,463kg. The fact that’s lighter than the 2,535kg Merc quotes isn’t a cause for celebration. Weight kills efficiency far more than aero improves it.

Weight also adversely affects handling. The EQE, intended to cruise, was clumsy and leaden around corners. The steering was sloppy and detached, the brakes were nasty, the pedal jerky and inconsistent between regen and friction systems. And it was slow. 7.3secs to 62mph may sound OK, but not in the EV realm, where a little Volvo EX30 is two seconds quicker. 240bhp moving 2.4 tonnes yields a power to weight ratio of just 100bhp per tonne.

“It’s an exec barge, it doesn’t need to handle,” I can hear some cry. True enough. But look at the E-Class and 5 Series. They could be nimble and fun and still glide along. And I’ve run another EV that handled tidily: Audi’s e-tron GT. I remember that car fondly so I drove one again. I wasn’t wrong. It was – by EV standards – deft and capable. It cruised nearly as well as the EQE, was as practical, yet far swifter, more composed and capable. And more attractive.

I think the EQE – and EQS for that matter – should have been standard bearers for Merc’s future. They needed to be bolder, more dramatic, more desirable, not just electric takes on ordinary saloons. Create desire and you create demand. And your residual values are less likely to collapse. Yeah, you remember the last report and the £40,000 this has lost in three months.

That has skewed my entire perspective. There must be owners out there close to despair. Don’t get me wrong, the vast majority will be leased with consequently less exposure to market conditions, but these drops in value – across the premium EV market – are unprecedented. But the cars were too expensive in the first place. A base EQE at £68,810 might be aligned with other comparable EVs, but looked too much money for what you got. This one, at £87,040, I struggled to get my head round. Especially when those gorgeous airvents turn out to be pretty flimsy plastic, the massage function just tilts the seat about and don’t get me started on those terrible steering wheel swipe pad controls. Infuriating.

We used to have value touchstones across the board: Fiesta, Golf, 911 and against those you could roughly pin everything else. Now it’s like the ‘how much is a pint of milk?’ challenge, no-one’s quite sure of where things lie when EVs have added £10-15k to the bottom line.

On a more upbeat note. It never went wrong. The driver assist systems were easily disengaged. The matrix headlights were the most accurate I’ve ever used. I liked the interior design and quality, the ambient lighting and infotainment. It was a very easy car to get on with, to just get in and drive.

But for this much money I expected more. I expected it to feel unique and special, to be better packaged, to have more dynamic bandwidth, to be more efficient. I kept coming back to the question I asked at the top: ‘what role does the EQ range fulfil for Mercedes?’. Six months on, I still haven’t figured it out.