Mercedes-Benz EQS 450+
Why 7.9: A drag coefficient of 0.20, the lowest ever measured on a production car, wrapped around a 107.8 kWh battery and a single rear motor that will do 780 km on the European cycle. It is the most efficient way Mercedes has ever found to move five people, and it looks like a computer mouse.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
Mercedes commissioned composed soundscapes — Silver Waves and Vivid Flux — that answer to throttle and speed, so there is more musical intent here than in the Taycan's synthesised sweep. But it is a recording played over the most aerodynamically silent body ever put into production, and most owners switch it off inside a week.
electric · rated 1.1 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €96k (2022) → €41k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Two ISOFIX positions on the outer rear seats, the outer pair being the ones the standard covers.
The rear anchors are the supported route — the manual points child seats there, and front-passenger ISOFIX is the exception rather than the rule. A belt-mounted seat up front needs the airbag off, and cars with a rear row don't always fit a deactivation switch, precisely because the rear seats exist.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The EQS was supposed to be the electric S-Class and it was engineered like one — rear-axle steering through ten degrees, Airmatic air springs, a cabin quiet enough that Mercedes had to add artificial sound to stop it feeling eerie, and an aerodynamic package that still holds the production-car record. What it was not was an S-Class, because Mercedes gave it a one-box silhouette that shares nothing with the saloon's proportions, and the customers who buy S-Classes wanted an S-Class. Leasing companies took the volume instead, and when those cars came back the used market had no idea what to do with them. The result is one of the fastest value collapses in modern luxury: a $102,000 car in 2022 was trading in the high forties three years later, and Mercedes responded by cutting production, discounting hard and eventually folding the EQ naming back into the conventional range. For this index that is close to ideal. Nobody speculates on an EQS — the battery warranty and the software-update dependency see to that — and nobody garages one, because it has no aesthetic following whatsoever. What the second owner gets is an enormous, silent, 780-kilometre-range luxury car for Camry money, and they drive it accordingly. Range anxiety is the only thing holding the mileage figure back, and on this car there is not much of it.