Dear all,
Today I’m going to give you another real life report on electric cars. If this is interesting for you, you should read on. Otherwise, I wish you a nice rest of your day. 🙂
If you want to discuss it with me, you are welcome to do so on LinkedIn, where I also posted my report: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6944409648397479937/
Here’s the article I have posted:
I have tested the Mercedes-Benz EQV, a BEV van, to find out if it is suitable for our family (2 parents, 3 kids, 0 dogs). Here’s my summary: We drove some 270 km on the weekend. Several short distance trips in the city (weekend shopping etc.) and one longer trip (2x80km) to visit a touristic place. I would estimate that 50% of the km were in the city (50km/h), 40% on countryside roads (100km/h) and 10% on the highway. The landscape is rather hilly, so I would estimate some 1,000m of uphill (and downhill) in total. The weekend was very hot, we had around 30°C, so AC was a must.
Conclusion:
- It’s a fantastic car. The interior is superb (some might simply say “it’s a Mercedes). The overall vehicle concept is great – very large, very flexible, comfortable. Five stars.
- The battery capacity is 90kWh. The consumption “since last reset” (some 5,000km) in the display said ’31kWh/100km’. That is huge. Our average consumption was 28kWh/100km. So the real life range would be around 300km. The consumption of my Tesla Model S was 21.6 kWh/100km (long term average). Obviously, the aerodynamics of a brick-type car is a problem.
- The picture shows me charging at the EnBW HyperCharger. I have no idea what’s ‘Hyper’ about this device. It’s a charger with 150kW DC max. That’s the theory. The maximum I have seen was around 110kW, the average value was 92.4 kW (46kWh, going from a range of 74km to 242km – I did not charge to 100% for lack of time). It took me 29 minutes. Everything worked fine, the process is easy to understand. I would call it “GoodCharger”, not “HyperCharger”.
- The price is € 0.69 per kWh, which means that 46kWh*0.69€/kWh / 168km = 0.189 €/km.
- Charging the same amout with my own PV panels would have cost me 46 kWh * 0.055 €/kWh = € 2.53 (production cost) or 46 kWh * 0.1 €/kWh = € 4.60 (opportunity cost of not selling the electricity to the grid). Both would have been the cheaper options, but I wanted to try the charger.
- The software both in the vehicle and the Apps is very confusing. I would say “typical traditional OEM”. 10,000 functions that nobody needs, but Mercedes failed at the most important aspect: trip planning. It is very difficult to find out how to get from A to B if the distance is larger than the vehicle range. The app tries to help you, but it is a huge challenge to understand what to do (and to trust it). Tesla is doing a much better job in that respect (albeit they also have a lot of room for improvement).
- The price would be around € 90.000. That’s expensive. However, Mercedes-Benz AG offers short term leasing for approx. € 1,000 per month all in (even including winter tires etc.). That’s a fair price.
Long story short: It was a good experience, but my wife and I have decided not to buy it. The car is too big for our everyday needs in the city and the range is too short for holiday trips. We will test another car next weekend…I’ll keep you posted.
If you want to leave comments or discuss with me, please do it here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6944409648397479937/
Have a nice day
David
PS: If you are not interested in electric vans but in automation solutions for the hydrogen industry, please join our webinar with Siemens: www.mission-hydrogen.de