Familiar styling conceals total transformation for brand’s best-seller as it turns electric to face the BMW iX3
I don’t know about you, but my home doesn’t have a four-dimensional surround sound system or a 39.1in touchscreen and it can’t autonomously reverse itself 120 metres back down a winding alley if it gets stuck. It certainly doesn’t have an electronically opacifying sunroof. But home is exactly what the new Mercedes-Benz GLC Electric is meant to feel like. In a bid to re-up its credentials as one of the world’s leading purveyors of supremely comfortable and generously equipped cars, Mercedes pledges that all its new cars will be so cosseting, intuitive and tastefully appointed that you get the “welcome home” feeling whenever you step aboard. It’s a refreshingly warm and fuzzy rhetoric that smartly runs counter to the growing perception of modern cars as sleek, soulless Swiss army knives on wheels with unbelievable functionality but little in the way of cosy familiarity – and it’s first embodied by this bold new electric equivalent to Mercedes’ best-selling model. Like its closest rival, the BMW iX3, the new GLC with EQ Technology is technically unrelated to its hugely popular, combustion-engined namesake, instead being based on a new-generation, electric-native platform that promises huge advances in performance, utility and packaging compared with the structures its manufacturer used for its first-generation EVs. For BMW, that’s the Neue Klasse platform; here it’s the new MB.EA platform that Mercedes has developed for a new range of mid-sized EVs, which will include a closely related electric C-Class, to be revealed imminently as a rival to BMW’s freshly revealed i3 saloon.
