Mercedes-Benz Vision EQS concept car drive

Concept cars are a bit like models or movie stars – they look fantastic in pictures, and even better if you’re part of a media gaggle allowed to get quite close to them, but there’s always that suspicion that they wouldn’t be that great to spend time with. That somehow it would be a disappointment.

Much as some actors are actually vacuous vessels with nothing in their heads, many concept cars you see on brightly lit stages at motor shows have no actual heart and soul – no engines or running gear. They are basically giant design sketches made real, wheeled out with great care and generally kept safe behind velvet ropes.

Occasionally, though, the world’s press are allowed to sit in them and be mind boggled by all the bright lights, white surfaces, flashing screens and the ubiquitous oddly shaped steering wheels, or joysticks. Without fail, the seats always feel like they were designed by a sadist, because super-thin seats look great, and create an illusion of extra spaciousness, but they’re rubbish to sit on.

What we’re doing today, then, is something very rare indeed, because we are being allowed to drive an actual, running concept car; the Mercedes-Benz Vision EQS. 

Sure, we’re nowhere near a public road – there are too many parts of this machine that would make it unroadworthy to mention – and we’re only allowed to drive it around in circles on the concrete apron out the front of a private-jet storage hangar in Melbourne, but still, I’ve never driven a concept car at all before, so it’s pretty bloody exciting.

Just getting up close to it is amazing enough for a start, beeches this vision of how Benz would create, will soon create, a super-silent S-Class, is pretty schmick. There’s that giant, 3D shining grille with the floating bright three-pointed star, the smooth, beautiful lines of the design, the absurdly large wheels (24 inches, if you’re wondering) so beloved of concept designers, and the way the whole damn thing just glows. It looks like it might have just dropped out of the sky from another planet, or rolled off a Hollywood movie set. At night, with all its LEDs, it would look even more incredible.

That grille is actually made out of 920 individual LEDs, mounted in strips of five, while at the rear you can see 230 star-shaped lights, with those two nests of lights linked by a single, awesome strip of light that encircles the whole vehicle.

In the production model, the idea is that the lights will brighten as you approach, and, visually, tell you how charged up your batteries are.

And then you step inside and it’s hard not to picture yourself in Back to the Future II, except that now, where you’re going, you won’t need buttons. There simply aren’t any, the idea being that all the controls will be projected on to those white surfaces and will sense your hands.

“The whole car gets a display, no matter what element is visible to you, and whether you’re in the front or the back, you get information. Whenever you reach towards the car, a camera watching your movement registers that, and so buttons or controls appear as you reach towards it, and then vanish as it moves away,”a Benz spokesman explains. This sounds so S-Class tech-tastic you just know it will be on a production vehicle soon.

The seats look great and Tron-esque, but they’re not fabulously comfortable, and when you look closely you can see a few unfinished things about the car – there are no seatbelts for a start, so we’re asked to drape one across ourselves for photography. The driver’s door also feels like it might come off if you’re too rough with it, so they have a guy to do the closing for us.

We’re also joined by a technician in the passenger seat who lifts up the console to reveal a mess of wires and Dick Smith shop looking buttons, which he uses to fire up the EQS with a suitable EV hum.

The steering wheel looks not at all like a wheel, so standard concept-car spec, and there’s plenty of visibility from all that glass, and light from the clear panels in the roof. You also quickly notice the lack of any wing mirrors – there are tiny stalks that would have cameras in them if this was a real car.

The other thing this Vision EQS would have if it was the real deal – and the Benz folks insist the real deal will look and feel very much like this, which is pretty incredible to consider – is an all-wheel-drive set up with an electric motor on each axle providing 350kW and a zero to 100km/h time of 4.5 seconds, which is very fast indeed for an S-Class.

What’s actually sitting under us today is not clear, but it’s an electric motor of some kind, and somewhat less powerful than 350kW, I’m guessing. 

We set off with a zooming sound and there’s a sense of unreality that’s instant. It’s like being on some kind of Disney ride, you can’t quite believe that turning that weird half wheel is actually turning the car. The tiller is completely impractical and borderline awful to use, as it turns out, but hey, it looks great, and they’ll never put one in a real car anyway.

We zip around in circles for a while and there’s a bit of wind noise, because again, this thing is an idea, a concept, not a real car, and that means my minders are also very nervous about Melbourne turning on its usual rain. It’s not that the car will melt, like a sugar cube, more that it might well leak water on to the electrical inside. Not good. 

Still, I’m allowed to keep driving until I’ve had enough of going around in circles and can report that, as weird as it all looks, it feels as normal as any other EV.

The whole experience is surreal and superb, but the most exciting thing is that this is not a concept car in the usual sense; a flight of fantasy, this is very much what Benz wants its first luxury EV super saloon to look and feel like, and as Mercedes has already shown with its EQC, they really are taking the whole electric revolution seriously.

Bring it on, we say.