Listen, I’m no Tesla die-hard. I like EVs in general, and I’m happy to see more manufacturers making solid, attractive electric vehicles. I think they’re neat — I just haven’t actually driven that many. My experience has been limited to Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3, Ford’s Mustang Mach-E, and the Kia Niro EV (which is cooler than you’d think). There are still a ton out there that I can’t wait to try, and that’s why I jumped at the opportunity to rent one I’ve had my eye on for years on a recent trip to Denver.

The 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+

The EQS is an enormous luxury electric sedan. Its huge 108 kWh battery pack contributes both to its fantastic 350-mile advertised range and its 5500-pound curb weight, and powers motors producing 329 horsepower. That’s about a thousand pounds heavier and 120 fewer horsepower than a Model Y Performance, to put it in terms I’m familiar with.

Couldn’t imagine it in any other color.

There are a few cars on the road today that just look electric, and the EQS is absolutely one of them. It’s ground-up design prioritizes aerodynamics and cabin space, but we end up with a car that has some good angles, but generally, looks a lot like a bar of soap.

The interior is very comfortable and comes with all the modern conveniences you’d expect: adaptive air suspension, panoramic sliding sunroof, forward, reverse, and top-down 360 cameras, front seats with heating, cooling, and massage functionality, heated rear seats, a heated steering wheel, projection headlights, ambient lighting, huge screens, and little pillows on the headrests, but I’d expect nothing less for an MSRP that made my nose bleed, starting at around $105,000.

Strengths

I’ve spent very little time inside Mercedes-Benz vehicles — even less inside newer ones — but I have to assume the interior of the EQS is squarely in their wheelhouse. The car’s cabin is quiet, it’s smooth, and it’s comfortable. It’s a plush counterpoint to the often brusque ride of the Teslas I’ve driven. The throttle is smooth, steering is light, hiding the car’s weight, and the turn radius on this thing, thanks to rear wheels that turn slightly to tighten the turning circle at low speeds, is crazy.

A look inside.

There are a ton of small, thoughtful, and fun features sprinkled throughout the EQS. Maybe I’m simple, but I’m still impressed when a car has massage seats. When you start the car, the seat belts retract automatically, pulling you gently against the seat. An incredible touch. When stopped at a traffic light, the main screen shows a view of the signals, a significant quality of life improvment for people tall enough to struggle with looking up at a light from the driver’s seat.

And yes, I don’t know fancy cars that well, but this car does lighting better than any I’ve ever seen. The projection headlights have animated startup and shutdown sequences. Downward-facing lights project the Mercedes-Benz logo from the driver and passenger doors when you’re entering or leaving. The interior ambient lighting, while entirely a gimmick, is awesome. It’s done really well and it looks great.

The car’s advertised range is 350 miles, and this feels entirely realistic to me. I drove for days between charges without range anxiety or thinking about charging at all. This was the first EV I’ve driven with a battery that discharges as slowly as a gas tank empties. Sure, Tesla’s range estimates aren’t far off and are technically achievable under ideal circumstances, but I totally believe the EQS, at least through Denver’s thin air and smooth highways, could realistically go 350 miles in a charge.

Weaknesses

For as comfortable as the EQS is, it’s also full of inexplicable decisions and bad implementations. An unfamiliar driver is inundated with an overwhelming array of steering wheel controls, buttons, knobs, switches, and screens. Searching for any setting means descending through an absurd menu tree — for example, the button to turn the ambient lighting on or off was buried five menus deep. The design of the interface, or MBUX, is fine for a legacy automaker, but far clunkier and more inconsistent than anything you’d expect from a major consumer software company.

The EQS braking system blends friction and regenerative braking as you press the brake pedal. It’s a good idea that abstracts away the specifics of how the car is slowing itself, something the driver typically doesn’t need to know about. In this case, it’s not done well: the point where the braking responsibilities pass from the motors to the pads isn’t matched well, or perhaps drifts over time, leading to an inconsistent braking experience that feels exactly like losing traction on an icy road.

Basking in Electrify America’s soft green glow.

The specs say that the car is capable of fast charging at 200 kW, but I never saw anything over 100 kW during my week. This was despite plugging in with a charge less than 10%, when the car should be charging at its fastest. Charging propects are further hamstrung by Electrify America and the general state of CCS charging, especially compared to Tesla’s Supercharger experience — plug it in and it just works. Fighting with behemoth CCS cables, unresponsive or offline charging stalls, and charging speeds that never came close to approaching the stall’s rating.

The back seats have leg room to spare, but the car’s aerodynamic shape steals some head room. There’s a nice view from the back thanks to the car’s double sunroofs. The rear seats are heated, but aren’t ventilated, and don’t recline or move.

Final Opinions

For reasons we’ll discuss later, I’d be worried about this car’s long-term reliability. I’ve heard stories from people in the industry that Mercedes-Benz dealers don’t know how to effectively diagnose or service their electric fleet, leading to long delays for repairs.

A bit much?

The Mercedes-Benz logo is all over this car: a bright LED three-point star in the center of the front end is surrounded by dozens of smaller reproductions, which you’ll also find all over the dash inside, the logo projected onto the street from the side mirrors. It’s a little flashy for my tastes, but it’s probably necessary when releasing a car that looks this odd. If this car didn’t scream Mercedes-Benz, its odd proportions and aggressively aerodynamic shape would culminate in an incredibly dorky vehicle. Because we all know the brand, the styling is subconsciously forgiven and we perceive instead as eccentric, interesting, oh, that’s expensive.

I mean this in the nicest way: the EQS is a low- to no-compromise way for people with a little too much expendable income to experiment with electric vehicles. If you’re already an EV enthusiast leveling up to the six-figure car club, you’ll find some things to be impressed by, but Mercedes-Benz' prioritization of comfort and class over straight-line acceleration and technological minimalism might not be your cup of tea. In a way that’s new to me, the EQS is an EV that’s luxury-forward, rather than EV-forward.

This 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+

I can’t give a fair summary of the EQS without taking some time to discuss the specific one I got. This was a Turo rental, which, much like Airbnb, was once a fantastic way to save money or experience something out of the ordinary, but now is mostly a way to fund someone else’s misguided dream of be-your-own-boss entrepreneurship.

The guy that owns the car I used dropped it off at a hotel near the airport, which helpfully avoids a nearly $100 airport pickup fee levied by Turo as required by the city. While I took a cab to the pickup point, he politely informed me that the rear driver’s side tire was low and that I could either take it up with Turo and try to get another car, swing by a tire shop to have it repaired, or try to keep up with the leak over the course of the rental. I may not be the busiest guy in the world, but I try to minimize the time I spend on the phone with customer support and in tire shop waiting rooms, so I chose instead to spend, cumulatively, much more time touring Denver’s suburban gas stations in search of functional air pumps every day or two.

This car was a workhorse. It was, at the time of the rental in late 2023, not possibly more than two years old, being model year 2022. In that short time, it had already racked up 34,000 rental miles, which are the hardest type of miles there are. The car was tired and had seen a lot, but other than the leaky tire and a persistent warning about the socket flap being open (I’m not sure what the socket flap is, but if it’s the charging port door, I can confirm it was not open), was clean and in good shape. Until three days into the rental, when one of the tail light assemblies died. I couldn’t signal right turns anymore, but by opening the sliding sunroof, I could manually point my intentions to nearby drivers in dense traffic (this actually worked really well).

Oh, okay.

Finally, the suspension (I think) started throwing errors and the car asked me not to drive over 50 miles per hour. At this point, the typical startup experience was a pleasant Mercedes-Benz welcome followed by a rotation of competing warnings about the tire, the brake light, the suspension, and the socket flap. Alright, enough complaining — I’m just glad it’s not mine.