Mercedes-Benz EQV Review (2020- )
Mercedes-Benz EQV cars for sale
3.0
Expert review
Pros
Incredibly spacious seven-seat cabin
Luxurious standard of finish
Capable of 110kW rapid charging
Cons
No five- or eight-seat versions
Clumsy to drive
The ride should be more comfortable
The CarGurus verdict
If seven seats and zero emissions are what you want, the EQV fits the bill, but only because the other options are limited either by range or by price. As a car, it isn’t entirely convincing; it’s lumpen and clumsy to drive, and the suspension isn’t the smoothest, and if you don’t drive with glacial care, the range nosedives pretty quickly.
On the plus side, it feels more luxurious than any of its seven-seat rivals inside, and it does offer a simply vast amount of space, making it a true seven-seater with room for luggage, too. But given its high price, it’s really only recommendable if the combination of seven seats and electric power are an absolute must. Otherwise, compromising on one or the other will allow you to buy a far better alternative.
If you want an electric vehicle, but you also need space to carry seven people around, you don’t have all that many choices at the moment.
Unless you want to fork out for a Tesla Model X, which will set you back £100,000, or as near as makes no difference, your choices are limited to a few electric versions of van-based people carriers from Peugeot, Citroen and Vauxhall, all of which feel a bit cheap and cheerful, and come with a somewhat limited range. Or there’s this: the Mercedes EQV.
As you’d expect from a Mercedes, the EQV feels considerably more luxurious than those other people carriers. And indeed it is, with a much more upmarket dashboard that features a slab of real wood with a pinstripe motif, and a more generous equipment list, too.
The EQV doesn’t get as many different seating options as its rivals, though. Where more affordable van-based EVs offer you a choice between five-, seven- or eight seats, you can only get the EQV in a seven-seat configuration. All the seats do slide backward and forward on rails, though, and in top models, you also get a fold-out table between the two individual seats; there’s plenty of space on offer, too, as you’d expect.
Turn the key in the slot on the dashboard and the EQV’s dashboard lights up, showing it’s been turned on – it’s hard to tell otherwise, as of course it runs silently.
This doesn’t stop it from being quite noisy once you get underway, mind you; there’s quite a bit of clatter from the suspension as it rides bumps, and when you get up to motorway speeds, that bluff nose generates a lot of wind noise, too.
The EQV isn’t exactly slow – indeed, it’s faster than most of its less powerful van-based rivals – but the enormous weight of the battery pack it has to lug around does take its toll. When it’s fully laden with seven people at motorway speeds, you might find it isn’t very responsive at all.
It feels nippier around town, but here it’s hampered by its sheer size, which makes it hard to squeeze through gaps and into parking spaces. The steering doesn’t have an awful lot of lock, either, which makes manoeuvring in tight spaces a chore, too.
The EQV we drove was a top-spec model with air suspension, which you’d expect to lend it a super-smooth ride. Unfortunately, though, it pitches back and forth over bumps which, together with its aptitude to pick up on smaller, niggling imperfections, can make it quite uncomfortable over poorly finished road surfaces. It is at least smoother and more stable on the motorway, mind you.
Mercedes claims an efficiency of 3.5 miles per kilowatt hour (mpkWh) for the EQV, which is actually very impressive given its weight and barn-door aerodynamics. It’s also better than you’ll get from a Tesla Model X, which is a surprise given the latter car looks much sleeker.
That should translate to fairly reasonable running costs, though keep in mind that a full charge of the EQV’s big battery will cost you more than it will in most EVs, and that might make it an expensive thing to keep in electricity if you plan to charge up at a public charging point with any regularity.
Servicing costs aren't cheap, mind you; even though the EQV doesn’t feature as many moving parts as an internal combustion engined car, it’s still expensive to service at Mercedes dealers, and you might find you have to stick with them for the time being as many independent garages aren’t yet au fait with servicing and repairing electric cars.
On the plus side, because there are fewer moving parts, the EQV should also incur fewer repair bills later in its life. You’ll have to balance this out against the risk of its battery failing or its battery life depleting prematurely, though; should this ever happen, replacement will be a hugely expensive endeavour given the size of the battery.
It’s hard to tell exactly how reliable the EQV will be, chiefly because it’s a relatively new car, and so we simply haven’t got any relevant reliability data to go on.
However, there are a few clues that can give us some pointers. For example, the Vito on which the EQV is based is pretty reliable, according to the latest reliability surveys of commercial vehicles; it finished in 8th place in the Fleet News FN50 reliability survey. Mercedes-Benz as a manufacturer, meanwhile, has finished first in the same survey, which is a very impressive result. That said, its performance as a car manufacturer is slightly less stellar, with a 22nd-place finish in the latest What Car? Reliability Survey.
Mercedes’s warranty is OK, but not great; your EQV is covered for three years, with no mileage cap. That isn’t quite as good as the five-year coverage you’ll get on a Citroen E-Spacetourer if you order one online. You do at least get a separate eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty on the EQV’s high-voltage battery.
- On the face of it, the EQV looks to be the best of both worlds, offering a longer range than its cheaper van-based rivals, but at a lower cost than the Model X. All these things are relative, mind you, and the EQV will still set you back upwards of £70,000. That makes it look very expensive, especially when you take into account the fact that like those more affordable alternatives, it too is a primped-up van. And not a particularly cutting-edge van, either; the Vito, on which it’s based came out in 2014.
- One of the biggest things that sets the EQV apart from other electric MPVs is its range. You simply won’t find a full-sized seven-seat MPV anywhere else that can attain 213 miles between charges, according to the official tests. You also get a 110kW on-board DC charger, which should mean it’s fast to charge up – indeed, find a public charger that can match that figure, and you’ll be able to charge the EQV from 10 to 80 per cent charge in 45 minutes. That said, on a home charger it’ll take longer, thanks to the immense size of that battery – you’ll need around 14 and a half hours to charge it from 0% to 100% on a 7.4kW wall box.
- Worried about charging? If you buy an EQV, you can sign up to Mercedes’s Me Charge scheme, which allows you to pay one subscription and contract that gives you access to a host of different charging providers’ public chargers. You get an RFID card and an app, and can also use the car’s touchscreen to access chargers; Mercedes also promises that all the providers signed up to the scheme guarantee to feed an equivalent amount of renewable electricity into the grid to that which you use to charge up.
- If your heart is set on an EQV: With only one powertrain and three models to pick from, you don’t get a lot of choice with the EQV. Of those three versions, however we reckon the Sport Premium is the one that makes the most sense. You don’t get Apple Carplay or Android Auto on the basic Sport – which seems a little stingy, given how much it costs – but the Sport Premium isn’t quite as exorbitantly expensive as the Sport Premium Plus, meaning it strikes a decent middle-ground.
- If you want the SUV alternative: The Tesla Model X also seats seven adults, admittedly with not quite as much space surrounding them. It's also very desirable, has theatrical 'falcon wing' doors and goes like the absolute clappers. However, it's also ludicrously expensive.
- If you want the cheaper alternative: Either of the equivalent offerings from Citroen or Vauxhall - named the e-Spacetourer and Vivaro-e Life, respectively - give you much the same level of space and versatility as the EQV, but for much less cash. Do bear in mind, though, that their interiors are a lot less posh and their electric driving ranges are a lot more limited.
