Driving an all-electric SUV to the wilderness may not be that impressive after all.

Author: Chang Yan

As anyone who has written an article knows, the most difficult part is often coming up with the opening line from conception to composition.

It is not easy to tell a story simply and clearly in a way that is engaging and full of suspense.

If, before putting pen to paper, I could think of a good opening line for a test drive, that would be an absolutely happy moment.

When writing this article, I suddenly thought of three or four different ways to introduce it.

For example, I could talk about how I drove two different versions of a car on opposite ends of the earth in just one week.

Or, I could tell the story of how I dared to drift along in an open-top sports car in the snow and drove a pure electric SUV up a mountain, both previously unimaginable.

Alternatively, I could talk about my first invitation to participate in the Mercedes-Benz ice and snow activity six years ago, how I entered this industry, and how I witnessed the historic transition to pure electric vehicles at the Mercedes-Benz ice and snow activity six years later.

When you have so many options, this feeling—forgive my poverty of words—should be called composure.

When I first went for a test drive in Sanya, I wanted to use the word composure to describe it. Of course, at that time, I was a little nervous, perhaps because Sanya was too friendly to electric cars or maybe because the experience on the island highway was too comfortable.

However, when I drove a pure electric car along a 30-degree slope and up a cliff in the boundless snow this time, I felt that there was nothing more composed than this.

“Cold” and “pure electric vehicles” are a pair of words that have been fighting against each other for a long time. However, in the past, this group of contradictions tried to expose the age-old problems of “fast battery drain” and “reduced durability.”

When these two words evolved into “ice and snow” and “pure electric SUV”, the intense conflict undoubtedly increased a lot. To a certain extent, this is not just a problem of whether you can have a warm trip, but also a problem of whether you can come back alive once you enter the mountains.

This tests the SUV’s passability, off-road capability, the toughness, and comfort of the entire vehicle chassis, and incidentally tests how the intelligent era can easily and effortlessly enable new generation users to quickly understand how to handle this machine in off-road scenarios when they are suddenly taken out of the commuting environment of the metropolis.

On the Mercedes-Benz official website, you can easily see the complete technical explanation of EQS SUV in the chassis and driving parts. In summary, although it looks like traditional skills of Mercedes-Benz SUV, everything is reborn in the electric era.

The traditional concept of four-wheel drive, with the absence of mechanical transmission and power delay, demonstrates unprecedented agility.

In the dual-motor model of EQS SUV, supported by two permanent magnet synchronous motors, it can achieve a peak output power of 265 kilowatts and a torque of 800 Newton-meters. Although powerful power is the best ability reserve in any harsh environment, when encountering ice and snow, you often have to learn to allocate the ability of almost nothing to make a difference.

After 4MATIC went electric, although its name has not changed, its intelligence has made progress equivalent to that from a mouse to a Pokemon. Based on the detection of the tire power, it can achieve up to 10,000 output adjustments per minute. In the past, many people thought that when stepping on the accelerator of an electric car, the driving wheels start to scratch the ground and generate enormous power, however, they didn’t know that controlling the wheels without slipping is the skillful and exquisite technique of electric control.# Facing a 30-degree snowy slope, all you need is just to gently step on the accelerator.

The deepening ruts left by the preceding car allow us in the following car to clearly see the ups and downs of the preceding car on the bumpy road surface, as well as the slight forced swaying of the vehicle after the snow wall acts on the wheel edge. These are often not friendly to an SUV of such a large size. However, with the intelligent algorithms in the AIRMATIC air suspension, the parameters of the dampers are dynamically set to minimize vibrations and rebounds as much as possible. And the rear-wheel steering that we praised during automatic parking is also preparing the vehicle to constantly correct its posture in the snow.

And if you are wondering how to master so many systems, perhaps all you need to do is to pull down the main screen and click on the off-road mode switch on the screen.

Often, test drives of a new car seem to avoid showing other car models in their materials, especially for SUV test drives. If a tough off-road vehicle is placed next to it, it will always be criticized for its lack of self-confidence in its own off-road capabilities.

But when big G forces frequently appear in the off-road scenes of EQS SUV, you seem to feel this is a kind of praise. Places that only a trustworthy high-G can go to, although not easy, EQS SUV is here.

For the users of this car, it seems that they will never put their own car on a snowy ridge. But the ruts left by our trip have already told them that the wheels will not be a barrier limiting their imagination.

This is another kind of composure that belongs to the car.

It’s quite a coincidence that the EQS SUV was waiting for me at the airport shuttle after I typed the above sentences on the flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco.

Unlike challenging off-road driving in the glacier, experiencing rear-seat travel at high speed seems to be a completely different extreme. However, in different road environments, different driving habits, and even different power configurations, EQS SUV still performs well in any role traits that should be possessed in any segmented scene.

So when we got off the car and showed the video of us climbing the snow hill to the driver sister, she seemed to be envious but not surprised.

This is a kind of composure that belongs to those who have driven it.

It’s amazing that Mercedes’ ice and snow test driver slogan has always been related to composure, and this time the pure electric SUV climbing the snowy field seems to be nothing to boast about.

Everything was already planned.

This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.