But don’t pay attention to the appearance
Mercedes is working on a purely electric platform for commercial vehicles, but also for the successful VIP shuttle that we know as V-class. It looks like we see that car here, although you certainly shouldn’t pay too much attention to the appearance of this test mule.
Yes: a ‘mule’. Everything indicates that the ‘van’ you see here is not a camouflaged version of a car that Mercedes-Benz Vans actually wants to use soon, but only a hastily put together cover for the technology that lies beneath it. We see all kinds of parts of the current V-class, but combined in an unusual way into a strikingly narrow and stocky whole.
What lies beneath, however, is not entirely secret. Mercedes has already opened a book about the new VAN.EA platform, an architecture that should make it possible to come up with a wide range of electric commercial vehicles by being constructed in different modules. A passenger car in the style of the V-class has also already been announced in that series, with the platform name VAN.EA-P.
The luxury passenger car brother of the Vito, the V-class, is very important for Mercedes. This car rules the luxury passenger transport class throughout Europe. Anyone who needs to transport a large group in some comfort will quickly end up in a V-class on our continent. We have also known the V-class as an electric EQV for a few years now, but there are two reasons to assume that that car will change significantly. The first is a technical one: the current EQV is an electrified regular V-class/Vito. The new one is at least on a platform developed purely for EVs, but may differ much more strongly than now from the Vito equivalent that many contractors drive.
The second reason has to do with the name. The successor to the EQV will undoubtedly no longer be called EQV, because Mercedes wants to get rid of the prominent role of the EQ label. The electric G-class presented this week is the first evidence that the Germans are making haste with that policy, because the electric off-road vehicle is not called EQG. Mercedes previously indicated that all newly developed medium and large vans will be on the new platform from 2026, so let’s carefully aim for that year for the introduction of this Vito-like one.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl