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The Mercedes-Benz EQS was launched last week and is yet another electric vehicle that enters the Malaysian market. Available in a sole EQS 450+ AMG variant, the asking price for the brand’s flagship EV sedan is RM698,888 on-the-road without insurance, inclusive of sales tax and current EV incentives.
Mercedes-Benz EVs are relatively new to our market, with the first being the EQA that was launched earlier in March this year. During the EQS’ introduction, Mercedes-Benz Malaysia also revealed the EQB and EQC, both of which will receive official pricing in the coming months.
With more EVs bearing the three-pointed star coming our way, we posed the question of reliability to MBM president and CEO Sagree Sardien as well as head of sales and marketing Michael Jopp in a group interview following the presentation of the trio of EQ models last Friday.
“First of all, we are very confident. If you go back to the first generation of hybrids, we are now at least three generations advanced. The battery management on the new generation [of EV batteries] is developed in-house, so I would say there’s also a lot more effort gone into them and making sure that these cars function,” said Jopp, who added that over-the-air (OTA) software updates will further improve the performance and reliability of EQ models.
“We’ve probably tested these EQs more intensively than any of the cars that we have launched before. We need to get more first-hand experience because typically, in many cases actually, you [the media] get to drive the cars earlier than we do,” he continued.
Indeed, in the days before the EQS was presented, MBM general manager of pricing and product management Christian Grimberg as well as manager of product management (EQ, SUV, AMG and fleet) Florian Neff took a camouflaged unit on a long-distance trip up and down Peninsular Malaysia from Kuala Lumpur to Penang to Johor Bahru and back to KL, covering a distance of 1,693 km for evaluation purposes. The EQS 450+ has a WLTP-rated range of 782 km on a single charge.
The EQS also comes with a 10-year/250,000-km warranty for its EV battery — this is following Mercedes-Benz’s global warranty standard – which is the highest among all EVs currently sold in Malaysia that typically maxes out at five years/160,000 km. Even after that period, the assurance is the 107.8-kWh lithium-ion battery will still be able to hold a 70% charge.
“I can say, to further exude this confidence, you would have seen in Michael’s slides when he put it up, that’s why in EQS, we go up to, on the battery, 10 years or 250,000 km [warranty] because we are convinced on this next generation of battery that most certainly, hopefully we do not have the issues we have experienced in the past,” said Sardien.
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