Range anxiety has trained most electric car drivers to treat the dashboard readout as optimistic fiction. Anyone who has watched a highway gradient drain a battery at double the expected rate knows the drill: knock a fifth off the advertised figure and plan your stops accordingly. So when a manufacturer insists its flagship luxury sedan can cross entire regions without plugging in, skepticism is the only sensible response — at least until independent testers put the claim to the sword.
The crew at Edmunds did exactly that, and the outcome deserves attention. Their standard range evaluation of the 2027 Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+ ended only after the car had covered 867 km on a single charge, smashing its official EPA rating of 752 km by a remarkable 116 km. That performance crowns the revised EQS 450+ as the longest-legged electric sedan Edmunds has ever run through its loop, leapfrogging the Lucid Air and landing second on the publication's all-time chart. The only machine ahead of it is the Cadillac Escalade IQ, a colossal SUV that essentially carries a studio apartment's worth of battery to get there.
Source: Edmunds
Many headline-grabbing range runs rely on deserted interstates, a locked cruise setting, and favorable weather. Edmunds instead follows a methodology designed to reflect ordinary weekly driving. Its fixed Southern California route blends 60 percent urban driving with 40 percent highway travel, producing an average speed of 64 km/h. The climate system stays in automatic at {{72ºF}}, the car runs in its Eco setting, and the regenerative braking is dialed to maximum recuperation.
Tested this way, the big Mercedes sipped energy rather than gulped it. The EQS 450+ used only 26.9 kWh per 161 km traveled, undercutting its official EPA consumption figure of 28 kWh. The previous 2025 model needed 29.1 kWh over the same distance in identical testing. Credit goes to a modestly enlarged 122 kWh battery — up from 118 kWh — built around revised cell chemistry that wastes less energy as heat.
Covering huge distances matters little if refilling the battery takes forever, and this is where earlier EQS models stumbled. The old electrical architecture limited peak charging to 208 kW, respectable but unremarkable. For 2027, Mercedes moved the hardware to an 800V system, unlocking a 350 kW peak for the EQS 450+. In Edmunds' charging session, the sedan averaged 222 kW from nearly empty to full — a massive leap over the 175 kW average its predecessor managed.
The practical payoff is measured in minutes rather than kilowatts. Edmunds benchmarks charging by how much range a vehicle absorbs over an hour plugged in, and the 2027 EQS 450+ delivered 1,328 km per hour — enough to inject 161 km of range in roughly seven minutes. That is close to double the pace of the 2025 version, and it slots the sedan third on Edmunds' charging leaderboard, trailing only the compact 2027 Mercedes-Benz CLA 250+ (1,341 km per hour) and the aerodynamically gifted 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 (1,490 km per hour).
On the handling circuit, the entry-level EQS demonstrates that flagship pace no longer requires a big engine badge. Where the previous 450+ made do with one motor driving the rear wheels, Edmunds reports the new test car channels 402 hp and 504 Nm through a dual-motor all-wheel-drive layout. The sprint figures: 0 to 48 km/h in 2.6 seconds, 72 km/h in 3.9 seconds, 97 km/h in 5.4 seconds, and 121 km/h in 7.6 seconds. It dispatches the quarter-mile in 13.7 seconds at 168.5 km/h, hauls down from 97 km/h in {{108 feet}}, and holds 0.93 g around a {{200-foot}} skidpad. Sports sedans won't lose sleep, though drivers must still tolerate Mercedes' curious habit of letting the brake pedal shift beneath your foot during strong regenerative deceleration.
The cabin remains a temple to the touchscreen. Three displays span the dashboard under the MBUX Hyperscreen banner, now running on the new MB.OS platform with integrated Google navigation and AI-powered assistants. Subtle exterior revisions soften the old "melted lozenge" silhouette, even if the car still can't match a combustion S-Class for road presence. Mercedes engineers have also been demonstrating a steer-by-wire system mated to a rectangular yoke, though American customers will be spared that experiment for the time being.
The bigger story is what this car signals about the luxury EV market's direction. A base EQS 450+ opens at €87,900 including destination in the US, while the generously optioned test vehicle totaled €103,811. More powerful EQS 500 and EQS 580 variants sit above it, yet the entry model arguably makes the strongest case of the family.
By overhauling its charging hardware and stretching verified range comfortably beyond the 500-mile threshold, Mercedes has transformed a clumsy early experiment into the definitive electric grand tourer. The takeaway is hard to miss: the most compelling luxury EV isn't the one boasting outrageous horsepower — it's the one that carries you across an entire state without a single thought about where the next charger might be.
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