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Driving Experience and its Competition

The EQE 350+ is powered by a single electric motor situated at the rear axle and driving only the rear wheels. There’s a peak power output of 292hp, and it’s actually very quick by mainstream Singaporean standards. The 0 to 100km/h dash is written off in 6.4 seconds, which means that it matches the Volkswagen Golf GTI in a straight line sprint.

The instant power delivery of the electric motor, along with the fact that EVs typically only have one forward gear, make for a seamless forward momentum once you put your right foot down. It won’t match a Tesla Model 3 in a straight line, but then again, The Model 3 Performance’s 3.3-second century sprint is really for bragging rights and of very little use on public roads.

The EQE 350+ is a real smooth operator and very much what you would expect from a medium Mercedes-EQ sedan. It doesn’t have the AMG EQE 43’s aggro synthetic soundtrack piped in through the speakers, but after a couple of days you might just come to the conclusion that it’s not needed because all that whooshing noise just detracts from the car’s awesome Burmester sound system.

The rear-wheel driven setup of the car offers less ultimate traction than a twin-motor, all-wheel drive system, but as seen in BMW’s excellent iX3 which is also a rear-wheel driven car, the dynamic character of the vehicle really comes to the fore.

It’s not branded as a sports sedan because there’s the AMG version of the EQE for that, but there’s little to complain about how the car moves at speed. The 2.4-ton weight of the car will see it chewing through tyres more than lighter ICE cars for sure, which for a similar size typically weigh in at under 2.0-tons. But stopping power is excellent and when in adaptive regeneration mode the car can deccelerate quite smoothly when following behind another vehicle. 

Its suite of active safety systems include adaptive cruise control, and under normal traffic conditions on the highway the car can really be left to its own devices and the car moves in your chosen lane semi-autonomously. Your hands still need to be on the steering wheel, or else an alarm tone sounds and the system is deactivated.

However, it’s worth nothing that the rear view through the window is quite… tiny. The rear window is a sliver of a slot, with three headrests in the way. They probably went ahead with it anyway since there are comprehensive reverse cameras fitted to the car.

What is it like driving the all-electric BMW iX for a day?

The car accepts charging rates of up to 170kW DC, which in everyday terms means that at maximum charge you’ll be completely recharged in under an hour. However most public fast charging stations use 50kW DC for now, though quicker ones are less than a year away. A home-based 11kW AC charger will top up the batteries from near-empty to full in under eight hours, which basically means an overnight charge. 

Incidentally, if you’ve ever been baffled by exactly how long an ‘overnight’ time period is, as mentioned in everything from EV charging literature to cooking shows, it’s really eight hours.

While the EQE 350+ has a claimed power economy of 18.4kWh/100km, which will result in a real-world range of just under 500km, we found that in practice the car is actually more efficient than stated. 

Mixed driving with a good amount of expressway jaunts will lower the energy consumption average to as low as 15.5kWh/100km, which pushes the car’s range to nearly 600km. On Singaporean roads, range anxiety is never going to be a problem.   

With BMW’s all-electric version of a 5 Series sedan still ahead, The EQE’s main competition will come from the Audi E-tron range. These are not base model luxury cars. They are expensive, green cars that cost more than S$400k each. Sure they may require a lot less maintenance than an ICE car, but consumables like tyres require replacing more often as the weight of the EV tends to wear them out a lot quicker.

Mercedes-EQ EQE 350+

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