More Details On Mercedes-Benz's Electric Dream

It’s been a while since we’ve learned that Mercedes was working on an electric car, in order to compete with Tesla, currently the only company offering an electric vehicle with a long-distance range. 

However, the information we had about Mercedes working to initially release a big electric car is, apparently, no longer true.

In fact, it appears that Mercedes-Benz now plans to release a compact electric sedan before 2018 and a compact electric SUV the year after. The sedan would be a little bigger than the current C-Class, and the SUV would be about the size of the current GLC. 

Following those two cars, Mercedes will go on with the release of two bigger electric vehicles, an S-Class type sedan, and a SUV about the size of the GLS.

All those cars are going to be based on the same “EVA” platform, which itself is an adaptation of Mercedes’ current “MRA” platform serving as the base of the C-Class, E-Class and S-Class.

The base versions of all these vehicles will come with a 300-kW engine at the back, powering the rear wheels, but a secondary engine for the front wheels will be offered, adding between 50 and 150 kW to the total power output of the car, thus making the car AWD.

With that much power, those vehicles will be able to rival Tesla in terms of performance.

Mercedes’ initial target is to sell about 20,000 electric vehicles a year, but frankly, the historic brand should have no problem doing better than that.

It’s a bit early to estimate the price of those cars, but UK-based Car Magazine reveals that the price of Mercedes-Benz’s small electric sedan will be set above the price of a new Tesla Model S 70D, currently the cheapest Tesla you can buy.