Who builds the best luxury EV?
BMW comes with the electric i7 as an answer to the Mercedes EQS in the luxury segment. Can Mercedes fend off this attack or is the EV from Stuttgart already suffering from the braking lead? In this test we put the two electric toplimos side by side.
Is the Mercedes EQS an electric S-class?
At the top of the market, Mercedes-Benz and BMW have been competing with each other for decades with the S-class and the 7-series respectively, in addition to conventional drive technology, if desired, also with hybrid and plug-in hybrid systems. More than a year ago, Mercedes took the next step: to fully electric. Only that not with the S-class, but with a completely new model, the EQS. BMW now comes with an answer in the form of the fully electric i7. In the fairly traditional market in which these cars operate, the EQS was the odd one out. It is not a conservative sedan, but a hatchback or rather a liftback: the complete, sloping rear goes up with it. By designing its own body for the EQS, Das Haus has been able to use all the freedom to optimally design it as an EV.
So the BMW i7 is an electric 7-series?
For the i7, BMW is taking a different route than Mercedes is doing with the stand-alone EQS. The i7 is simply the electric version of the latest 7 series. The new 7 is traditionally a sedan and is simply available again with petrol and diesel engines, with the petrol versions being plug-in hybrids. From the start of the development of the new 7-series, a fully electric variant has been taken into account. Still, you have to make concessions here and there if you offer a model with both a conventional and an electric powertrain. To get an idea of how things work out in practice, we put the i7 next to an EQS. To be precise, we have the BMW as i7 xDrive60 and the Mercedes as EQS 500 4Matic, two cars that are very evenly matched on paper.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl