Month: June 2022

Enlarge / The extremely aerodynamic Mercedes EQS 580 (credit: Eric Bangeman)

Mercedes-Benz first gave us a glimpse at its electrification strategy in 2018, with its first battery-electric vehicle—the EQC 400 crossover—going on sale in Europe in 2019. Sporting a range of around 220 miles, (354 km) the 402 hp (296 kW) SUV never made it over to this side of the Atlantic. The US instead got a pair of EQS sedans that went on sale in 2021: the $102,310 EQS 450 and the $125,900 EQS 580.

The EQS 580 4Matic is the heftier of the two models—it has more motors, more mass, and more horsepower. And don't mistake it for an S-Class sedan with all of the internal combustion bits swapped out for batteries and motors. The EQS is a new vehicle architecture designed from the beginning to push electrons, not hydrocarbons. And those electrons will push the EQS 580 a very long way—340 miles (547 km), to be exact.

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  Mercedes used the front of the EQS 580 to show how fond it is of its logo. There's no frunk above the plethora of three-pointed stars. [credit: Eric Bangeman ]

You can't get that far in an EV with a massive battery pack, and the EQS 580 has 107.8 kWh of juice at its disposal (the battery actually has a capacity of 120 kWh, about 10 percent of which is off-limits for driving). But what's truly impressive about this electric sedan is an absurdly low drag coefficient of 0.20, which is unmatched by any production BEV. It looks sleek, but at first glance, the profile isn't that much different from an S-Class sedan. Upon closer examination, you'll notice the longer wheelbase and a pop-open slot on the front quarter-panel, which is another clue to its aerodynamic profile. That slot is for adding wiper fluid, because not only does the EQS 580 have no frunk, the hood does not even open.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of a magnetar. (credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library)

If you think black holes are the scariest things in the Universe, I have something to share with you.

There are balls of dead matter no bigger than a city yet shining a hundred times brighter than the Sun that send out flares of X-rays visible across the galaxy. Their interiors are made of superfluid subatomic particles, and they have cores of exotic and unknown states of matter. Their lifetime is only a few thousand years.

And here's the best part: They have the strongest magnetic fields ever observed, so strong they can melt you—literally dissociate you down to the atomic level—from a thousand kilometers away.