Concepts · 2022
A thousand kilometers. One charge.
Not a bigger battery — a thinner car. Mercedes built the most efficient electric vehicle it had ever made, then drove it across Europe to prove the number was real.
In January 2022, chairman Ola Källenius introduced a silver teardrop and a claim that sounded like marketing: more than 1,000 km on a battery that would fit a compact car, at under 10 kWh per 100 km. Eighteen months of work. One obsession: efficiency.
That April the Vision EQXX left Sindelfingen, crossed the Alps, and rolled into Cassis on the Côte d’Azur with about 15 percent charge left — 1,000-plus kilometers, average consumption 8.7 kWh/100 km. The tears on the team were not staged.
Chapter I
Cd 0.17 — and still looks like a car.
Designers and aerodynamicists chased a teardrop: Kammback rear, rear track 50 mm narrower than the front, semi-transparent wheel covers with tiny vents. The result was a drag coefficient of 0.17 — below the EQS, below the Model S — without resorting to rear wheel spats.
They kept real wing mirrors on purpose. Camera mirrors would have drawn power the range budget could not spare.
On the roof, 117 solar cells from the Fraunhofer Institute fed a separate lithium-iron-phosphate pack for ancillaries — navigation, HVAC, wipers — worth up to about 25 km of high-voltage battery relief on a long day.
Bionic lightweight structures, magnesium wheels, Bridgestone tires engineered for rolling resistance: every gram and every watt had a name on a spreadsheet.
- Drag Cd
- 0.17
- Battery
- <100
- kWh usable
- Consumption
- 8.7
- kWh / 100 km
- Voltage
- >900 V
Sindelfingen to Cassis
1,000+ km
On public roads, one charge — then they did it again in June 2022 and March 2024.
Epilogue
The blueprint, not the brochure.
The EQXX was never meant to be sold as drawn. It was meant to teach the MMA architecture how to waste less — software-first UI, silicon-carbide inverters, battery packaging dense enough for a compact footprint. Range anxiety, Mercedes argued, dies when efficiency becomes the product. The silver teardrop was the proof of work.