Mercedes EQS SUV 450 long term review, 1,200km report

The Mercedes EQS SUV 450 has entered our long-term fleet and immediately impressed my kids. Relegated to the back seats whenever we head out, my kids are super happy in the EQS 450, which is a 5-seater, unlike the 7-seat EQS 580. There's a good amount of space, and the rear seats are veritable thrones, or command centres, as our family boss - our 16-year-old daughter - calls them.

Touchscreens mounted at the back of the front seats and a pop-out tablet controller nestled in the armrest allow you to control ambient lighting, HVAC settings, and music over the car's main audio system and on the supplied Bluetooth headphones. What really got her giggling with glee was that she could also view - not alter - the car's setup, like the various EQ displays, with graphs showing range, speed and even the trace of the wheel movement. Full command-centre vibe!

Noise-cancelling headphones can even keep out sound from the car’s main audio system.

Getting back to the headphones, they are simply brilliant at cancelling out sounds from the cabin - to the extent that you can listen to your own audio while other passengers enjoy a separate audio source over the car's main speakers. The only complaint is that you can't have them on for too long as the clamping force of the headband is high. Still, on an hour's drive from Mahim to Borivali, both my kids enjoyed music from their phones while my wife and I listened to the radio over the superb Burmester speakers.

It is difficult to get a precise change in volume with the steering touchpad.

The seats are super comfy, and the pillows over the head restraints were a hit with the kids. Oddly, though, both my wife and I could not get a comfy position with the ones at the front; they always seem to push your head forward a bit more than you'd like. Speaking of things I didn't like, the touchpad steering controls are a pain to use. You have to very deliberately slide your thumb to raise the audio volume, but even then, you invariably raise or lower it too much, and what's also not nice is that there is no dedicated track-change button on the steering wheel. Alleviating this to an extent is the passenger touchscreen, which allowed my wife to take full control of the audio.

Spare tyre, tools and two charging cable bags take away a lot of boot space.

The boot, with its paraphernalia like the spare tyre, tools and two bags for charging cables, is pretty much full before you even load any luggage. But it’s kind of par for the course, with others like the BMW iX, too, suffering the same fate.

Like its more powerful sibling, the EQS 450 also comes equipped with air suspension, which irons out bumps and ruts nicely and silently. But there is noticeable body movement, and while Sport mode does tidy this up, I would have still liked better body control. One handy trick of the air springs is the ability to automatically raise the car at a preset GPS location so you can store the location of various speed breakers and get over them comfortably. In the time I’ve had it, there’s not been a single belly scrape.

Rear-wheel steering makes light work of tight corners.

Compared to its sibling, the 544hp 580, the EQS 450 is down on power with 360hp, but that's still enough. The whole point of a car like this isn't to tear up a highway or go corner-carving but to cruise along cocooned in comfort. And for a quick overtake, there's enough power just a prod of the throttle away; 0-100kph comes up in 6.1 seconds. It's also impressively silent at speed. Manoeuvres through tight traffic are also easier, thanks to the rear-wheel steering setup that remarkably tightens the turning circle. I often adjusted for its length only to find the rear really tucking in tight around a turn, to the point where I would have to loosen the lock to avoid scraping the rear. Once you get used to it, it's simply brilliant.

I'm going to have to struggle to keep the keys to this one. Hormazd has already said he would like to drive this one soon and take it up to his weekend holiday home in Mahabaleshwar to put it through a proper range test. I still haven't depleted the 122kWh battery pack, which promises an MIDC range of 820km. I've only clocked about 500km in the city so far.