The Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX concept car has just completed its third single-charge long distance mission, but this time, it’s even more impressive than the previous two. Because not only did it cover over 1,000 km in a single charge, it’s also achieved its lowest energy consumption figure yet at 7.4 kWh/100 km, and all in the blazing heat of the Arabian desert.
Mercedes-Benz says that the energy consumption figure is equivalent to a fuel consumption figure of just 0.9 litres/100 km, which is pretty much unheard of in a regular internal combustion engine or hybrid vehicle. Even after driving for over 1,010 km from Riyadh to Dubai, a journey taking some 14 hours and 42 minutes to complete, the on-board computer on the Vision EQXX still showed a remaining range of 309 km!
To keep the test as real-world as possible, the test route includes not just flat highway sections, but also urban and sub-urban sections in Riyadh and Dubai with heavy traffic, the company says. And with the blazing sun shining down in the Arabian desert, ambient temperatures during the road trip went up to as high as 34 degrees Celcius – far from ideal for an EV.
Mercedes-Benz credits the Vision EQXX’s impressive performance in the third 1,000+ km run to its thermal management system, which uses a multi-source heat pump to effectively and efficiently keep both the powertrain and cabin cool. As a result, the air conditioning system could be left running throughout the entire journey with “minimal negative impact” on energy consumption. The same heat pump has now also been incorporated into the Concept CLA, which we presume, also means make it into the upcoming all-new Mercedes-Benz CLA.
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Also aiding its performance in the desert was the Vision EQXX’s solar roof, which uses 117 solar cells to power many of the ancillary devices to reduce energy usage on the high-voltage system. Mercedes-Benz says the solar roof harvested 1.8 kWh of energy through the 1,010 km trip, adding approximately 24 km to the overall range.
The Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX is obviously not a production vehicle – one glance at its weird slippery shape would have already told you that. Its purpose is to serve as a test bed for future Mercedes-Benz EV technologies and design. To wit, it’s already covered over 23,340 km of testing under a wide range of demanding real-life conditions since it was first revealed back in 2021, and these testing have already begun to bear fruit, like the aforementioned heat pump system.
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