620 Mile Road Trip vs. Mercedes VISION EQXX

April 23, 20222 years ago Jo Borras 0 Comments

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

Why did a team from Mercedes drive across three countries on a 620-mile all electric road trip? “Range is the only thing people care about,” one German automotive executive (who shall remain nameless) told me at COTA, last year. “They don’t ask about anything else.”

The Lucid Air will take you more than 500 miles on a single charge– and that, apparently, is not even close to enough for some people, who will always find a reason to fear the transition to electric cars. So to show that Mercedes’ next-gen EVs will have even more in the tank than Lucid, a team of Mercedes-Benz drivers put the VISION EQXX concept to the test, traveling from Sindelfingen in Germany, across the Swiss Alps, through Northern Italy, and finally to its destination of Cassis on the Côte d’Azur on the French coast. The car “effortlessly” covered more than 1,000 km (621 miles) in real-world traffic and weather conditions, on a single battery charge.

“We did it! Powering through more than 1,000 kilometers with ease on a single battery charge and a consumption of only 8.7 kWh/100 km (7.1 kWh per 62 miles) in real-world traffic conditions,” says Ola Källenius, Chairman of the Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz Group AG. “The VISION EQXX is the most efficient Mercedes ever built. The technology program behind it marks a milestone in the development of electric vehicles. It underpins our strategic aim to ‘Lead in Electric’.”

If you’re trying to lead in electric, in America, that means: road trip. And road trip they did! The route Mercedes’ team took brought them from motorway to mountain pass, through construction, and in varied the weather conditions. All of these variable presented the VISION EQXX with the same familiar challenges drivers face every day— and the car handled them just fine, thanks.

What’s more, this wasn’t some surface-road, low-speed, and carefully engineered “record run” designed to grab headlines. Mercedes emphasizes that this was a real-world test run, with highway speeds regularly exceeding 140 kmh (85-90 mph, which is legal there).

“(The Mercedes) VISION EQXX sliced through the wind at speeds of up to 140 km/h (87 mph),” reads the official press release. “With its low cd value of 0.17, it gives the wind virtually nothing to grab hold of. This world-beating figure for a road-legal vehicle results from the intelligent interaction of many individual measures. It starts with the basic shape of the body, cradling the smooth-surfaced dome of the greenhouse as it flows elegantly like a water droplet towards the rear … the active rear diffuser, which automatically deploys at 37 mph (60 kmh), provides better airflow and thus contributes significantly to the reduced drag.”

For context, the VISION EQXX went 100 miles further than the highest EPA-rated range achieved by a production car— the 520 mile Lucid Air Dream Edition— and more than 200 miles further than the standard-bearing Tesla Model S Long Range. And, sure, the EQXX is a multi-million dollar prototype specifically designed to do stuff like this— but still: mission accomplished! (And, hopefully, not in the George W. Bush sense.)

You can check out a few more pictures of the Mercedes VISION EQXX electric concept car in the gallery, below, then let us know what you think of this slippery stunner in the comments section at the bottom of the page.