Mercedes EQS Peels Back the Camo and Reveals More Details

• Mercedes-Benz pulled the camo off the EQS electric car, revealing a very rounded off large sedan.

• It has a range of 479 miles on the European scale, which will likely translate to over 400 miles here.

• The battery is warrantied for 155,000 miles.

Mercedes-Benz continues to dribble out new details on its EQS electric sedan, and today we get to see what it looks like without the camo. Take a gander. What do you think?

“It’s as simple as it is striking,” said Sylvain Wehnert, VP of Mercedes-Benz Design and the head of the company’s studio in Carlsbad, California. “This one line that starts from the front goes all the way over the roof and then, with this nice tension, ends in the rear and creates this monolithic, mono-volume but at the same time super sporty and luxurious shape.”

Your eye and your brain never shake the feeling that this body was shaped for aerodynamic efficiency above all else.

“What you see here is clearly an S-Class in the context of EV mobility,” Sylvain said.

The look and the basic proportions started about six years ago with the F 015 concept that was built to foretell the coming autonomous driving future, but which could also be driven by a real human being. That look was further refined in the Vision EQS, which looked a little closer to a real car that could be produced and sold around the world. And now we have the straight-up EQS, the S-Class of electric cars.

So what’s it like to see in the flesh? The whole thing looks really, really rounded, not so much like a jelly bean but more like a large and very healthy vegetable, one that is good for you and you will eat it whether you want to or not.

“Looking at the proportion, that’s obviously the most striking, unexpected element,” said Wehnert. “We don’t need a tremendous hood, so we shortened it. To the degree where we really liked the proportion, we also took opportunity of the fact that we could bring the front point of the cowl down, create this really aerodynamic but super sporty look, it’s super-seamless and clean and round on the front section, because you don’t have a radiator grille, so you’re much more flexible. That’s how we interpret it, this is new freedom in the front.”

That theme stretches all the way to the back of the car. Even the door handles retreat flat into the doors, presenting themselves when you swipe your hand across them.

“We’ve continued with our design theme of the bow design,” said Sylvain. “So you see the bow basically coming from the front, we’re stretching all over the DLO (daylight opening) to the very end of the car. And what it does is, even though this is a big car, this is a very big car, it looks super-sleek and stretched, and elegant and dynamic. And it looks actually much lower than it is when you walk to it. And you really notice that it is, as a matter of fact, an inch higher than an S Class.”

The S-Class manages to look far sleeker, despite its large proportions. But the S-Class doesn’t have to create an absolute bare-minimum coefficient of drag the way the EQS must.