Back to Page 1: Introduction, interior, design

Driving Experience

Like all luxury cars these days, the AMG EQS 53 gets a list of selectable drive modes from eco to sport+. In its quickest mode the 0 to 100km/h sprint is covered in 3.8 seconds.

Find the Race Start mode, which really shouldn’t be used on public roads anyway, and the same sprint timing drops to just 3.4 seconds with a temporary extra power boost. 

No use having power and no control, so the car is fitted with active four wheel drive, adaptive suspension, and four-wheel steering for mind-boggling agility. As with all EVs since Tesla started the whole ‘press accelerator to launch instantly’ thing, the AMG EQS 53 delivers all of its power with a prod of the pedal, fast enough to feel like you’re being teleported.

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You can drive it along at supercar pace if you wish, but on local roads you will very quickly run out of space. It has a claimed power economy of 23.0kWh/100km, though in real world use expect around 24.0kWh/100km, which is high for an EV. But this is a very powerful one, so we’ll live with it.

When only a prancing horse will fix your need for power, we’ll take this one

You can choose to have it jet about in total silence, which it really does, or activate a catalog of synthetic noises to make the driving experience a little more organic. There’s a very menacing sport sound mode that really makes the car sound like a fast sci-fi spaceship. It hums with a slightly edgy character when the car is at a standstill, and whooshes along with your accelerator pedal input. It’s all generated digitally and piped in through the audio system of course. 

It’ll do stately cruising just fine, but it’s a real AMG EV, and is seriously quick with handling ability to match. It’s arguably more fun to drive than most of the Porsche Panamera lineup.

One quirk of the aggressive four-wheel steering system that we discovered is that it’s a double-edged sword: it’ll help the car turn tight corners easily and makes it handle like magic on winding roads, but reverse parking in tight spaces gets confusing, because the rear end of the car moves sideways a lot more than you would expect. If you have a garage of different cars this one will take some getting used to when parking. 

Conclusion

It’s luxurious, blazing fast, very intelligent, very shiny, filled with lights, computers, and all that jazz. Plus the liftback boot makes it a very practical load carrier too.

Until the BMW i7 goes on sale there’s no EV on sale here that can match what the AMG EQS 53 has to offer. While the Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo seems like a worthy competitor it’s got a very different build philosophy, is actually slightly cheaper, and less powerful too.

Audi’s RS E-Tron GT posts similar performance to the AMG EQS 53, but is less techy in the cabin and has a driving range of more than 100km less per charge. Speaking of which, the EQS 53 does well with a claimed range of 570km. You can expect just under 500km in real world use here, but even with that the Mercedes-EQ EQS series of cars has the longest driving range of any production EV on sale here now. The annual road taxes on EVs in Singapore are still heavy-hitting, but for now on tarmac, the AMG EQS 53 is the real heavy hitter.

Mercedes-AMG EQS 53 4Matic+

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