And, I like it! - There are many things about this car I would not like to be missing.
After some very poor customer experience with main competitor - and for most aspects of e-mobility I would call them market leader - Tesla, I decided to go for Mercedes EQC.
Comparing the EQC with Tesla vehicles I have to say that Mercedes knows how to build cars. Especially the interior design is top end of car manufacturers craft. There is little missing with respect to drivers and passengers comfort. However, this can be called commodity nowadays. Any of the traditional upper class car builders is providing comparable respective comfort and drivers' experience.
What is missing is the innovative user experience associated with e-mobility. In these aspects there is a clear and massive gap versus Tesla technology.
The question is: why?
Is it because of intellectual property? However, I thought Tesla made all its patents public and freely available, this in order to foster innovation for e-mobility.
Is it because of lack in product leadership at Mercedes? This could well be. In an established industry such as car manufacturing product leadership might be a decentralised capability across the company. While now when innovating in new technologies, in products with new characteristics, in new product ecosystems, there need to be new visionary and strong product leaders in order to make this business great.
What we are experiencing when looking at electric cars from traditional car manufacturers might well be the challenge when reliable stable and good companies - such as Mercedes-Benz or Audi - are trying to enter the space of a new growth business - which entering e-mobility clearly is.
These mechanisms are very well described in "Good to Great - Why some companies make the leap ... and others don't" by Jim Collins. A book I can highly recommend in these regards.
In order to provide some illustration, here some critical examples from my last months of Mercedes EQC user experience:
Charging at home:
There is absolutely no way to program for instance the starting time point for the charging process. I can program when I would like to have my car fully charged and air-conditioned but this does not really solve my immediate problem.
Why is this important to me as car owner, user, driver, customer? Where I live electricity is much cheaper at night, after 8pm, than during the day. When I arrive at home prior to 8pm I would like to have a simple option to being able plugging the car immediately but starting the charging process no earlier than my selected time point.
How could this be achieved in a simple and cheap manner? The smartphone app which allows me to configure virtually every setting of the car allows also to select maximum charging capacity from 50% - 100%. Hence, it would be possible to send a remote signal controlling at least part of the charging process. Given the fact that there is already that cloud and app ecosystem respective intelligence even does not require to be part of the car software.
On the other hand, reflecting a bit what is needed for a respective feature, then this feature can't come too expensive. - If some Mercedes EQC product managers are reading this, please take something simple in that context up as a priority. I am pretty sure that many of your customers will be very positive about it. If you need help writing a user story, please get in touch with me ;-)
Internal charging module limited to 7.5 kW (after December 2020 there was an upgrade allowing 11 kW):
I can not understand why these limitations. Shouldn't charging be limited on the electricity supply side? It would be nice if one could use a standard house installation to its maximum capacity.
Finding a charging station - the missing intelligence:
When on the road searching for charging points in the EQCs navigation system there are a number of aspects which could benefit some improvements:
- Search for charging station providers for example (e.g. "Ionity"). It should be possible to get a list with all charging stations from a respective provider sorted by distance from current position, along the route, or at destination. The latter three options are implemented in charging station search, but searching for names is not really successful. Why would I like to do that? I might know that there is a charging station with interesting capacity somewhere in the area. How can I find it now? I recently was driving around lake Neuchatel in Switzerland knowing that on the high way around Estavayer le lac there is a Ionity power charging station. Guess what, I was not able to select it in the navigation system. Thanks to Google Maps on my smartphone I was able to identify the relevant service station.
- Another feature that is missing when searching for charging stations is the possibility to
immediately seeing what maximum charging power respective charging points can deliver and how many charging points there are. It would even be nice if the system could tell me if there is spaces available or if all charging slots are occupied. Why am I interested in that? Ok, the answer might be obvious, I would like to give charging stations priority where I have the highest possible charging capacity. Why would I go for a charging point with 7kW or 20kW if there is one with 50kW or much higher near by? Again here the solution is Google Maps or some other app. Only issue, I am not allowed to tap around on my smartphone and such apps while driving!
At low battery power:
When approaching very low battery capacity the car is suggesting to search for the next charging point. What I was wondering is if there was no way of actively providing options along the route. Just suggesting breaks in order to optimise capacity and keep time for required charging breaks low. I am pretty sure that there are smart algorithms which could help on that. If a driver is programming his entire planned trip, then I would expect the car to take care of electric capacity in order to arrive at destinations in time and to make it home without being forced in long charging sessions towards the end of EQCs capacity.
Overall:
There are a number of other features which need some improvement. For example the automatic speed sign recognition and associated adaptive cruise control. There are many situations where the car changes speed out of the blue. While other manufacturers are talking of fully autonomous driving Mercedes is still struggling with simpler features. Ok, I am not too much in need of autonomous driving because I like driving in the end. I just would like to point out some room for improvement.
