Yahoo Autos 2023 Mercedes-Benz EQE 350 interior and exterior review | Autoblog Garage
What comes out the other side when Mercedes-Benz chucks a well-established midsize luxury sedan nameplate into its magical EV converter? Take one look at the 2023 EQE sedan and you know right away that this isn’t merely a gasoline car with an electric powertrain in place of its old grease-covered parts. This is a clean sheet, free of the stains of dirty diesel and CO2 emissions, and in a way, a complete reimagining of the midsize Mercedes sedan. Whether that’s for better or worse is entirely up to you.
To read more about the 2023 Mercedes-Benz EQE 350 and other Mercedes-Benz news click the link below:
https://www.autoblog.com/2023/03/08/mercedes-eqe-350-road-test/
https://www.autoblog.com/mercedes_benz/reviews/
Video Transcript
BYRON HURD: Hey, everybody. It's Associate Editor Byron Hurd here at Autoblog. And in the fleet this week, we have the 2023 Mercedes EQE 350. And we're going to look at the powertrain, the interior, and talk a little bit about a Mercedes electric strategy as we give a quick walk around on this car. EQE. That means it's electric. E means it's a midsize. And this is what it looks like. It's a sedan-ish.
It's got that nice kind of blobby shape we've come to expect from newer electric cars. This one kind of hearkens back a little bit to the Chrysler bubble cars of the mid to late '90s, if you remember those, the Cirrus and the Concorde. The big cars look like they were kind of like cutting into the error that wedge but rounded off shape. That's what you've got here. It's interesting to look at. Maybe not necessarily beautiful. The jury's probably still out on that one.
This one, because it's electric, it needs to be aerodynamic. That's why we have that sleek look to it. There are some elements that are a little weird, including these kind of strange bumper protrusions that they put on the rear section, which remind us a little bit of the '70s and early '80s compliance bumpers. So in a way, the EQE is kind of a throwback, which is a little weird for an electric car considering they weren't selling a whole lot of those in the '70s. But here we are.
So EQE 350. That means it's the base model for this particular line for Mercedes. It does come with the pinnacle package in this particular case. So it's a loaded up base model, if that makes any sense. With the 4MATIC that means you get dual motors because that's how all-wheel drive works in an electric car. Total system output in this model is a modest 288 horsepower. But, of course, it has that good off the line punch you expect from electric motors. And since it has two of them, well, you're going to get that.
Something that people have come to expect from Mercedes-Benz level luxury is those little things that kind of make the car fancy. It doesn't have to improve the drive experience or the ownership experience. It's just something you can show off to your friends. In this case, we have the Mercedes-Benz script in the door sills. That's fully illuminated when you open the doors. And also visible in the door here is the ambient lighting that's LED and customizable, the same thing that we saw on the rest of the interior.
One more neat little lighting touch on the outside here-- you can't see it because it's sunny and icy and gross in the middle of Michigan right now. But at night, puddle lamps illuminate from the lights shining down on the ground, welcoming you to your car. Now, we are inside the 2023 Mercedes EQE sedan. As you can see, it is Mercedes through and through. High quality materials. Excellent fit and finish. You got this beautiful center screen here that just floats off the dashboard. Not quite as in your face as the over-the-top execution we see with some of these. It's subtle, but pronounced, which works.
There's a lot of other tech in this too. You get 100 Watt USB-C charging. So you can actually charge a laptop off one of the ports in this car, not just your smartphone. That's a nice touch. You get, with the pinnacle package in this car, the augmented reality navigation. So you actually get arrows and things pointing you where you need to go in the real world through your line of vision, which is just fantastic. Another advantage of an electric platform like this one is you get a lot of packaging advantages when it comes to designing the interior. So you get lots of space. You get lots of comfort. And you get to maximize every single square inch of interior volume.
So as you can see, we've got a cubby here. We have a cubby here, which covers the cup holders. We have the under console storage here. So you can stick stuff just about anywhere in this car. And the places where you can't stick stuff are the places where you're probably going to stick people. And those are also very nice. The seats are wonderful. You get ventilated and heated front and rear seats in this car standard. You get massaging seats as long as you option it correctly.
It's a Mercedes-Benz. It may not be the fanciest or nicest Mercedes-Benz you can get. But it's still pretty darn impressive. So we were really excited about showing you guys what's under the hood because the Germans say this has two permanently excited electric motors. We want to see what a really excited electric motor looks like. As it turns out, we can't actually open the hood. And it says, only the specialist personnel at a qualified specialist workshop should open the hood. Access by the customer is not permitted. We have been denied access. So, clearly, there's no frunk.
So there's no storage in the front. But we can take a look at what's in the rear. Because this is an electric car, that means the trunk should be pretty impressive. Sure enough, we get to see one of the advantages to electrification. Normally, when you have a rear-wheel or all-wheel drive car, you sacrifice a lot of trunk space.
As you can see, this is nice and deep. Goes down not just to this storage panel, but even below it, where you can see we have all of the recovery gear and your run flat protection and all that too. So you get all the advantages of a midsize car-- a nice, large, roomy trunk-- without any of the pitfalls you normally get from rear or all-wheel drive platforms. All right. That's the 2023 Mercedes EQE 350. Make sure to check out what we've got coming in the fleet next week. And let us know what you think about the Mercedes in the comments below.
