The verdict: Though the Mercedes-Maybach EQS680 offers exceptional materials, fantastic ride quality and a feature list as long as a football field, some annoying quirks and potentially frustrating tech means it’s crucial to take it on a very, very long test drive prior to purchasing.
Versus the competition: The EQS680 is in a class of its own: the all-electric ultraluxury SUV segment. The gas-powered Bentley Bentayga and Mercedes-Maybach GLS600 are its closest analogs, with the latter being an excellent (and more conventional) alternative to the Maybachified EQS.
What’s your definition of automotive luxury? Is it the preparation and presentation of fine materials? Is it isolation? Maybe it’s a car’s ability to project wealth (or hide it)? Perhaps it’s the toys that interest you? Historically, the luxury segment has been the place where automakers led the pursuit of entertainment, safety and design vectors.
A week spent with the 2024 Mercedes-Maybach EQS680 SUV taught me quite a bit about my personal taste in luxury — and it revealed quite a bit about what modern Maybach and Mercedes customers seek. Most of all, if you plan to cross-shop the EQS680 with pseudo-competitors like the Bentley Bentayga and Rolls-Royce Cullinan, you’ll need to sort your own hierarchy of luxury needs.
Related: 2024 Mercedes-Maybach EQS680 SUV Brings Electrification to Bespoke Brand
Competition Walk
I say “pseudo-competitors” for a number of reasons. For one, a maxed-out EQS680 surfs around the $230,000 mark, up from a base price of $181,050 (prices include destination). The Bentayga, meanwhile, starts just over $200,000 and can stretch to the high $200,000s, depending on options and Bentley’s willingness to entertain your imagination. The Roller is in a different league entirely, with a cost of entry near $400,000.
The EQS680’s main competition comes from inside the house, with the almost identically priced and positioned Mercedes-Maybach GLS600 serving as a direct, gas-powered foil to the EQS680’s all-electric elegance. There’s nothing on the market that directly competes with the EQS680; if emissions-free, ultraluxe people shuttling is what you desire, this is the bougie battery to buy.
Test Drive Required
But please, drive it first — preferably with as many of your family and friends as you can swaddle in its quilted-leather thrones for feedback. Usually I advocate that any car purchase is a deeply personal decision, but I’m not sure why you’d go for a Maybach EQS if you weren’t interested in lavishing luxury upon your passengers. They should be there to give the kind of insight and real-world feedback I experienced when shuttling my parents around greater Los Angeles in this SUV.
Like the rest of Merc’s EQ lineup, the EQS SUV is bursting at the seams with every manner of tech, complication, feature, gizmo, doodad and thingamabob the automaker could possibly cram into it. To Maybach, peak luxury is reached by combining leather, metal, wood and a feature list that unfurls like a CVS receipt. These Maybach trims are Mercedes, but more — from every angle and parameter.
That includes the exterior. I’m not here to render subjectivity when it comes to style, but it’s remarkable that Mercedes managed to create a car that both presents as shockingly anonymous and sticks out in traffic like a two-tone Beluga whale. That’s all I’ll say on the matter, with not a peep about the optional and very classy Night Series wheels festooned with the double-“M” Maybach logo. Nope. Not a peep.
Thrilling Threads
Inside is more to my taste, at least from a materials perspective. Without fail, the first thing you notice is the stunning MBUX Hyperscreen, a 56-inch span of glass that includes a 12.3-inch driver display, a 12.3-inch passenger display and a 17.7-inch center infotainment touchscreen. It’s a digital sprawl to behold, invariably inspiring new front passengers to futz with everything the moment their seat belt clicks into place.
It’s one of the most impressive digital landscapes I’ve seen in a car, and it looks particularly trick at night, especially when you dial in the nearly limitless color spectrum of LED accent lights rimming the cabin. The MBUX system is reasonably intuitive to use, and I enjoyed projecting my phone onto that massive center screen for all to follow along.
My mom volunteered for backseat duty. Tough break, really — she had to subject herself to the 680’s optional Executive Rear Seat Package Plus, which swaps a rear three-seat bench for two executive seats. Both seats have full heating, ventilation, recline and massage functions, and they’re divided by a rather large center console that hides folding metal-trimmed tables, as you might find on a private jet. The rear cupholders are heated and cooled, as well, which is great for whatever beverage you’d like on hand while you enjoy infotainment functions on the seatback displays.
No matter what seat you’re in, materials are top notch. The quilted Nappa leather is clearly the best Mercedes can offer, as are the metal tinsel and beautiful lacquered-and-pinstriped wood trim that’s available on select surfaces, including the power-retracting center console panel. The carpet is alarmingly high-pile; it made me feel quite guilty driving in my filthy Nikes. My mom, meanwhile, made great use of the Maybach leather throw pillows that were placed loosely on the rear seats.
Ride Rules
The EQS680 is mostly lovely to drive, cutting the same dynamic distinction that the GLS does between the Maybachified GLS600 and the base GLS450. That’s to say the EQS680 ups the softness and chassis isolation of the regular EQS580 to a shocking degree, and it dampens all inputs to a buttery tone. It’s remarkable how far chassis tech has come; you can very much have your imported Parisian cake and eat it, too — on bone china with sterling flatware. The Maybach’s sublime air suspension never wallowed but always coddled. Bumps and breaks in the road were taken out back and promptly shot, dispatching even the deepest and craggiest Los Angeles potholes with a distant whumpf.
It’s quick, too. A 118-kilowatt-hour battery feeds dual electric motors to the humming tune of 649 horsepower and 700 pounds-feet of torque. Even ensconced in the Maybach’s heavy cream, power comes on with a head-jolting rush, catapulting this 6,658-pound soap bar to 60 mph in 4.1 seconds, according to Mercedes. I’d suggest keeping such full-pedal pulls to a minimum, though; I experienced the strange and unexplained side effect of a flung pillow and a loud “Hey!” from the backseat. Must’ve been a glitch.
Some Quibbles
It’s a nice car — a very nice car — but I’m afraid it wasn’t all Maybach-branded roses during my tenure with the EQS680. A number of issues arose during my weeklong cruise, some of which wouldn’t have been discovered without folks in the back.
First of all, my driving position wasn’t compatible with the attention-monitoring camera, so every time I turned the EQS on I was rewarded with an audible and visual warning that I couldn’t use the hands-off portion of the adaptive cruise control system. The remedy was to position the steering wheel at an angle that wasn’t entirely comfortable, making day-to-day operation either slightly uncomfy or slightly annoying.
Carwide, we had frustrations with the air-conditioning system. My parents visited during a heatwave in Los Angeles, with 95-degree heat beaming down on the two-tone (but still partly black) EQS at all times. I almost always use the “auto” function of an automatic climate control system, allowing the car to act as a house thermostat does, self-regulating until the interior is at the desired temperature. Either the EQS’ automatic function couldn’t figure out how to make the car properly cool or I couldn’t find the right setting; toggling the auto function automatically closed and opened a series of dash vents at random. This was likely done for efficiency’s sake, with the aim being to cool the cabin as effectively as possible, but the opposite occurred in our experience. The most important zones in the car were left to bake without circulation while the lower vents were wedged open. Naturally, I turned to manual air-conditioning zone selection, but that didn’t actually help the situation because I wasn’t able to toggle individual zones a la carte and still had to wrestle with the self-adjusting system.
We were hot. The last resort was to manually crank the fan speed up fairly high and drop the temp to the mid-60s, resulting in a rather loud whistle that everyone in the car heard and requested be shut off. I’m not talking about fan noise, I mean a high-pitched and irritating motor whistle; it was especially apparent due to the Maybach’s general noise isolation and a lack of sound from the electric drivetrain.
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Perspective, Perspective
User error? Absolutely a possibility, but after a decade of rotating through the latest Mercedes products, I had quite a bit of MBUX knowledge to exhaust trying to figure out the climate troubles. The more digital and semi-hidden features automakers pile on, the more I’m having to shift my evaluative priorities as a car critic; stuff like touch-sensitive controls, tricky user interface and silly little toys I might not become acclimated to in a week’s time might prove to be non-issues for those who own the car.
In retrospect, then, our collective frustration with the gesture-controlled power-open-and-close rear chauffeur doors and the finicky tethered seat adjustment of the front passenger seat and the rear seat directly behind it might not be real-world issues for someone who puts more than a few hundred miles on an EQS. That said, I won’t extrapolate beyond that passing mention (and say that I do believe those power doors would benefit greatly from a hard button, like you’ll find in a Rolls-Royce or the old Maybach 57 and 62 sedans).
Luxury, Revisited
My definition of luxury? Fine materials, subtle presentation, meaningful features and isolation, as it turns out. The EQS680 hit some of those categories with its cashmere-wrapped Louisville Slugger and tripped over others with its size 15 Louboutins. Other than the obnoxious driver-attention camera positioning, it drives beautifully, with lovely accelerator tuning and some of the most remarkable brake blend (the balance between regenerative braking and the physical brakes) I’ve ever experienced, along with ride quality and quietness that are absolutely befitting of the Maybach crest. Much of the tech, however, felt more gizmo than gold.
I don’t dislike the 2024 Mercedes-Maybach EQS680 SUV, but I don’t love it either. I also don’t think I’m the target customer, though, and I can see how it could appeal to a certain type of buyer, especially one already familiar with the Mercedes-EQ ecosystem and Maybach finery. As the most luxurious EV on the market, the EQS680 makes a strong statement — just make sure to fill those rear seats on your test drive.
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