I have a goal of buying my dream house one day and I want the house to be off the grid when it comes to electricity and that means not depending on the normal supply of electricity. We also don’t know when the Eskom fiasco will be sorted out, therefore, investing in going off the grid seems smart. When your life revolves around such decisions this will impact the type of car you drive, and now you have more options for this market with a better range as well. The people of Mercedes Benz invited us to the special ride in the not yet in production EQC 400 and you can tell from the design that it’s a new car and it’s different from the rest of the Mercedes Benz cars. Since it’s fully electric it doesn’t have to have open grills and there is no engine noise, which takes time to get used to. I know that Mercedes Benz offered a lot of hybrid options such as the S400, which for business executives is a good option, but it doesn’t give much electric range like the EQC 400 which gives you a good 450KM per full battery.

   

This is great because this is better than what the competitor offers at this stage, and for black people, you can be able to go to Limpopo and charge overnight for the following trip. The infrastructure for electric cars still needs to be built in South Africa and the rest of the African countries, but when that happens the car would be able to calculate how many stops you need to do on a long trip so that you don’t end stranded.

Extensive access to charging stations – included as standard with the new EQC. Mercedes me Charge gives you access to an extensive network of public charging stations located in the city, at shopping centres or at motorway services, for example. EQC drivers also get access to the IONITY High-Power Charging Network, which offers rapid charging stations along all of Europe’s important main traffic routes – so there is no need to worry on long journeys. In South Africa, they will build a network that can help you charge on a trip to a city such as Cape Town.

At the charging station, authentication takes place via the media display screen, the smartphone app or RFID card. Everything else is handled automatically through Mercedes me Charge. One log-in, one invoice. For many public and all IONITY charging stations.

EQC 400 4MATIC: electrical consumption in kWh/100 km (combined): 22.2; CO2 emissions in g/km (combined): 0. Provisional figures.[1]

When you think about it 450KM would last me a week from my home to the office and that would be free electricity from the solar which will save me more money from petrol. If petrol goes up or down even when the prices of electricity changes that wouldn’t affect me much. Then my next aim is to figure out how to get water from the ground then I will be completely off the grid. This car gave me the opportunity to just dream about being off the grid and going completely green and it’s possible. Can’t wait for the media launch later this year because this car is going into production two months time.