2024 Mercedes-Maybach EQS Night Series Review- $205,000 Ultra-Luxury EV SUV

This is the new 2024 Mercedes-Maybach EQS 680 SUV Night Series. And what all that means is this is a luxury electric SUV with a sticker price of over $200,000. And it's fitted with all sorts of ridiculous little quirks and features and luxury details. Today I'm going to review the Maybach EQS SUV Night Series and show you everything. Today's video is brought to you by Cars and Bids, my online enthusiast car auction site that recently sold this and this and this and this and this. Check it out at CarsAndBids.com. All right, time for the quirks and features of the Maybach EQS 680 SUV. First, I want to thank Mercedes-Benz of Temecula for providing me with this EQS 680 to review. Mercedes-Benz of Temecula is a great Mercedes-Benz dealer. They have all the latest Mercedes models, including some weird and special and exciting ones like this Maybach EQS SUV. You can check out Mercedes-Benz of Temecula by clicking the link in the description below. But on to the EQS Maybach. So I reviewed the regular Mercedes EQS SUV back in October of 22, about a year and a half ago. Now they've come out with a Maybach version, which is of course Mercedes-Benz ultra luxury brand. It is called officially the Mercedes-Maybach EQS 680 SUV. It is fully electric like all EQS models and has 650 horsepower and 700 pound-feet of torque. Quite impressive. But this one is especially impressive because it is the Night Series version. Night Series is a $25,000 option on the Maybach EQS SUV. It brings the total sticker price over $200,000 and it adds some special touches. Starting with the all blacked out exterior look. You have black everywhere. All the trim, the door handles, around the windows, the wheels, it's all blacked out. Remember, it is the Night Series. And then there's the other stuff. Let's start with the wheels. All black wheels. But as you approach them, you can see there's something unorthodox. Maybach logos between the spokes. Just dozens and dozens of Maybach logos all throughout the wheel and all throughout all four wheels. These little subtly integrated, but kind of ridiculous Maybach logos. In fact, this car has an enormous amount of Maybach logos all throughout to remind you and everyone else exactly what it is. Take a look at the lower front bumper. This little grill is full of little subtle Maybach logos, just like the wheels. On the running board, you have a Maybach logo right in the center to remind everyone climbing in that this is the special one. The rear pillar, as you can see, a big Maybach logo and kind of an unorthodox spot as another reminder. In the headlight, this spot integrated into the headlight, you have a little Maybach logo to, again, remind people no matter which angle they're viewing the car from. Strangely enough, despite all of those Maybach logos, the hood ornament on the front is your typical Mercedes-Benz three pointed star rather than a Maybach hood ornament like some other Maybach models. Although it does say Maybach directly below the Mercedes logo imprinted onto the grill, very clearly placed there. And it's in this dark chrome color. That's a special Night Series thing. It replaces all the traditional chrome trim with this sort of dark chrome in order to black out everything to make it a Night Series. But anyway, next up, before I climb inside and show you all of the opulent Maybach details that this car has, I want to talk through a few general EQS quirks and features, starting with this panel on the front fender. It's unlabeled. You're not sure exactly what it is. Here's the explanation. The EQS SUV does not have an opening front hood. Unlike most electric vehicles, the hood doesn't open. There's no storage in there. It's closed, kept in place. And apparently there's mechanical stuff in there and an air cleaner to make sure the air that comes into the cabin is perfectly fresh. The result is there's no spot for you to add washer fluid since that's usually done under the hood. And so this panel, you press it and it pops out. You can see a little washer fluid logo and that's where you add it so that it can keep your windshield clean and you can spray it on in this little unlabeled exterior panel. Very unusual. Around back, another great little pop-out detail is the Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star, which is a logo, obviously, telling people what it is, but it's also the tailgate release. You press it and the tailgate automatically pops open, which is a cool touch. That's your tailgate handle. And it's the backup camera. When you put the car in reverse, the Mercedes logo pops forward. The bottom part is a backup camera that is only revealed when the car is in reverse. And so it has various different functions. Kind of a cool idea. And speaking of cameras, here's something that will bother the very particular amongst us. The front camera is not centered. You can see the center of the front is this line going down the grill, but apparently they didn't want to interrupt that line for the camera. So the camera is just slightly off center. Now you've seen that. You will never unsee it when you happen across a Maybach EQS on the road. Besides these little details, let's talk exterior styling in general, which frankly is a little bit of a disappointment. For a $200,000 SUV, this just doesn't have as much of a stately presence. It's not aggressive enough or showy enough or exciting enough. And I think that's been a big complaint of the EQS SUV. Frankly, there's a lot of stuff I love about this car, but that's definitely the biggest drawback. The exterior styling just doesn't look high-end luxury enough. But while the exterior styling may be a bit generic, you climb into the backseat and you quickly discover this vehicle's ultra luxury insanity. Let's start with opening the door. You unlock and the door handle pops out. It's delivered to you and it says Mercedes-Benz on the inside part. You only see that if the door handle is open and the car is unlocked. You open up the door and then you see this interior. The rear seats of the Maybach EQS, two individual seats, and it looks like first-class airplane, private jet luxury back here. A totally crazy array of upscale opulent wealth features. Let's start with materials, specifically the flatwood trim, which includes pinstriping, as you can see throughout, especially on this center console between the two seats. Absolutely beautiful. On the seat backs, you have individual rear pillows, head pillows, imprinted with a Maybach logo so you can get perfectly comfortable. And right next to the seat, a stereo speaker with a Maybach logo individualized to each rear passenger. In the center, if you want to open this center console compartment, you don't, like, push down on it like some plebeian car. Instead, you press a silver button closest to your seat and the compartment opens up automatically and gracefully, revealing a storage area and a cup holder which is heated or cooled. You can decide if you want heat or cool for your drink. When you're done using this compartment, you close it up by pressing the button. And, of course, again, this is the button closest to you. There's one individually for each rear seat, so you don't have to reach three more inches to press the button on the other side because, of course, you can't do that. Meanwhile, in between the seat backs, you also have a flat wood, beautiful storage compartment lid here and, once again, the Maybach logo printed on it. And as for the lid, you can open it up with this aluminum handle and see inside you have a nice storage compartment where you can stick stuff. And then there's the center console right between the two seats. You can open up this lid and you have a storage area in here which includes four different USB-C charge ports for all your devices, plus two HDMI ports to watch stuff and even an extra cigarette lighter style charge port for even more charging of stuff. And next up, another item you'll find in that center console, in addition to all the charge ports, tray tables for each rear seat. You can see it folds out and then folds again to become a tray table where you can put a laptop or a tablet or eat your lunch while you're being chauffeured along. But the real insanity back here is not entirely all of the luxury features, but the screens. There are three rear seat screens. Two of them are mounted on the backs of the front seats. They're touchscreens and you can use them for all sorts of stuff. For instance, you can turn on a massage, a rear passenger massage, and you can pair it with heating with the heated rear seat so you can have a hot massage while you're being driven along in opulent comfort. You can also use these rear screens to check the current air quality of the car. There's a graphic that shows the exterior air quality and then the interior air quality once it's passed through the Mercedes EQS air cleaner that I mentioned is up front. Now, something else you can see in this air quality section is a little icon marked fragrance. You can press that to turn on an interior fragrance, and you can adjust from three different fragrance settings. When you have fragrance on, a fragrance will blow through the climate vents along with the air conditioning or the heating and keep the cabin smelling like you want. In order to change the type of fragrance that you're smelling, you go into the glove box and there's a little compartment here where you can add a fragrance canister that you can buy from Mercedes-Benz in your desired fragrance. You can also use these screens to check what each individual occupant in the car is currently listening to in terms of music and then adjust it if you want to make a change. Obviously, if you're listening on wireless Bluetooth headphones, then you can all be listening to different things. And from the back seat, you can adjust what someone's listening to. So if you want to change, for instance, what your child is listening to without having to reach over or whatever, you can do it from your screen. And then there's the energizing comfort tab. You go there and you can select from a wide variety of different themes or moves that will pair the interior mood lighting with a certain ambient song or sound so that it can set you in the mood that you've chosen. Specifically in this tab from various different options, the car will set the lighting and sound to cater to your mood. But let's say you don't want to reach all the way up to the back of the front seat in order to make these adjustments. Well, you don't have to because there's also a rear tablet back here. You press this little eject button in the top of the center console and the tablet is delivered to you automatically and electronically. And you can see the screen shows basically the same stuff that you had on this touchscreen position in front of you. Now you can lie back and make the adjustments without actually having to reach up or move at all. And this also includes seat adjustments and you can adjust these rear seats in a wide variety of ways, including basically a lie flat, fully reclined, total relaxation posture as you can see here. It even moves the front passenger seat out of the way so that the rear passenger on this side has as much space as possible to basically recline all the way, lie down in total comfort bliss with their hot massage on and their energizing comfort program delivering the perfect ambient sound and lighting for the moment. It really is amazing back here. And next up we move on to the front of the Maybach EQS SUV where you're greeted with even more over-the-top luxury. Starting with the most obvious item, the hyper screen, which is a massive screen that essentially goes across the entire dashboard from the driver's door to the passenger door, the whole way from one side to the other. It is absolutely huge. And when you combine that with the rear screens, this car is just loaded with screens. So many screens, in fact, that there's one that just displays Mercedes-Benz logos floating in the air. That's how many screens they have in the EQS. Now beyond the giant hyper screen, the real party trick in the Maybach EQS is you can open and close the doors automatically. So you climb inside, you put your foot on the brake pedal from the driver's seat, and the driver's door automatically closes itself. But it's not the only door where you can do that. You go into a menu in the screen and you can open or close all of the doors. Passenger door, rear doors, all can be automatically opened or closed from here, very much like a Rolls-Royce. It is a very nice luxury touch that you can just do that without ever having to reach out, pull on something, open a door handle and push it open. Forget all of that comedian behavior. You can do it all from the screen. And there's even an icon in the screen that lets you close all of the doors automatically. So your kids got in, three of the doors are open, they forgot to close them, push a button and everything closes up at once and the car is shut without you having to do anything. But okay, back to the hyper screen situation for a second. The screen over on the passenger side of the dashboard is not just there to display flying Mercedes-Benz logos. Instead, it activates once you have someone sitting in the passenger seat. You can see I sit down and then a little start-stop icon appears. You can turn on this screen and then it becomes a personal screen for the passenger. Now, it basically replicates what you saw in those rear screens in the back and also in the center screen in the front. But now the passenger doesn't have to reach the extra eight inches over for that center screen. They have their own display screen where they can control stuff without really putting in any extra effort since it's directly in front. As for the center screen in this car, the middle part of the hyper screen, it's really fantastic. An absolutely giant center screen as you can see, but tremendously easy to use, very intuitive, very responsive, large display icons, large print makes it very easy to figure out where everything is. Now the climate controls are integrated into this screen, which I usually consider to be a bit of a drawback, but they are also easy to use and easy to figure out. And they are basically fixed on the lower portion of the screen. So there's no real time when they disappear and you have to go into menus to find your climate controls. It's all right there and easy to figure out. Then there's the screen directly in front of the driver, behind the steering wheel, the gauge cluster screen. This is also excellent. In its default setting, it just displays the gauges, the basics like you might want to see, but it's configurable to show a wide range of different stuff, including you can have the music you're playing displayed large or the map displayed large. Very configurable in various different ways. One of the best, most configurable gauge cluster screens in the car business. But beyond just the technology up front, the automatic doors and the hyper screen, there are a lot of other really impressive luxury features. Like for example, well, pillows again, mounted to the headrest, as you can see with the Maybach logo stamped into them. Nice pillows where you can rest your head while you're driving or sitting in the passenger seat that makes your experience even more luxurious. Maybach logos also printed on the pedals, by the way, as you can see these aluminum pedals, they look beautiful and they remind your feet that you're driving a Maybach. And of course, there's more beautiful trim up here. You have this lovely flat wood, as you can see in the center console with the pin striping, just like you had in the back. And the flat wooden pin striping also appears on the door panels and still looks absolutely gorgeous. And there are other interesting quirks to this vehicle, like for example, the fingerprint recognition system. This little black square in the center console is a fingerprint detector sensor. You put your fingerprint on that if you have the car configured and it will automatically change various items to be configured for your exact liking matched to your fingerprint. So instead of pressing a memory button or using a specific key, now you got your fingerprint memory, which is really impressive. Then there's the sounds. You climb inside this car and you start it and the startup sound is this. Sounds very futuristic and you get a similar sound if you accelerate. Feels like a spaceship taking off. Have a listen. Now, obviously you can turn off these sounds, but it is kind of a nice futuristic touch to an electric car that doesn't make any engine sound. Instead, you're greeted with these futuristic little notes of music. Next up, another interesting quirk. There is a built-in dash cam in the EQS. You go into the center screen and there's a little dash cam icon and you can turn it on to have it record constantly while you're driving so that if something happens on the road, there's an accident, you have proof that you weren't at fault or maybe proof that you were. Next up, another interesting item in this car. The hazard light button is mounted here in the center console. It's a triangle just like in most cars. You press it and it flashes red, but also it has little red wings on either side that flash along with it. Just kind of an interesting and unique and quirky touch. And speaking of a quirky touch, you got another one with your sunroof control. It's mounted in the ceiling like in most cars, but it's not a button or a switch. Instead, it's a slider. You slide your finger back and then the sunroof mimics that motion by opening up. You tap it while it's opening and the sunroof stops. Because you've stopped it, slide your finger forward and the sunroof closes. And you can do this all with your sunroof slider in the upper center console. Kind of an interesting touch. And here's another interesting touch. This one, my box specific. Below the center console, you can see there's a little storage compartment here, a storage area, and it is stitched leather, padded, stitched leather in this compartment. In a regular EQS, you do not have that leather pad, but in a Maybach EQS, you do because it's a Maybach. And speaking of storage, let's talk cargo area. Although first, climbing out of the EQS, one neat trick, if you want to close the door, just tap on the door handle and it will close automatically. You don't have to slam it or even push it. But climbing into the cargo area, you press the Mercedes-Benz logo. Like I mentioned, the tailgate lifts up automatically and reveals a couple of fantastic quirks. One is the Maybach logo mounted on the inside of the tailgate. It's mounted upside down so that when the tailgate goes up, it is positioned right side up and you can see your Maybach logo, even with the tailgate open. And then how about the Burmester speakers mounted on the cargo area cover? These beautiful silver aluminum speakers are on the cargo cover. That's not something you see on most cars with a flimsy little pull-out cargo cover. Here, you got speakers to enhance your sound experience. Also worth pointing out back here, the EQS Maybach comes with pillows. You can see included in this plastic bag, you have these perforated stitched leather pillows. There's no specific spot for them to go. They're just for rear passengers if they want to place them on a lower back or next to the head for sleep to enhance their comfort. Pillows that come with the vehicle. Now, the other thing you'll notice back here is that the rear compartment is not especially large, particularly given the size of this car. In the regular EQS SUV, you would have fold-down seats, a third row and a second row that you could fold down to maximize your cargo space. But in the Maybach, you have fixed rear seats because a priority is placed on the rear seat compartment and all of its luxury. So you don't have folding rear seats and they take up a bit more space than usual since that's the focus of this car. So little small storage area, but that's the reason why. All right, driving the EQS Maybach. Oh, my head on the pillow. I gotta tell you, the EQS cars have gotten some hate and I think a lot of it has to do with their like relative lack of desirability compared to an S-Class or a GLS or whatever. They're a little weird looking, you know, they're all screen, but they're nice. This car is nice. Oh, it's just so comfortable. And I feel that way about the regular EQS sedan. And I feel that way about the non-Maybach version of this SUV. There's a lot of people who I think aren't ready to embrace the concept of like a fully electric, you know, luxury car that Mercedes is going that direction. And so instead they kind of tear down these cars like, oh, that thing's stupid, that thing's ugly. It may be ugly, but man, is it nice. Now, when I say nice, what I mean is a few things. Number one, the ride is just so smooth. I'm sitting in this car and it's just like your troubles melt away. The world around you is not available or accessible. You're not thinking of the difficulties and dullnesses of life. You're just sort of gliding along in this nice luxury SUV. You just don't hear anything going on outside. I don't know how they managed to do it, but I mean, this car has the same level of sound deadening as any of the highest end brands, Rolls-Royce, Bentley. I mean, you hear nothing. At least you hear nothing of other road users. You do hear your own tires, but I do have, I mean, there's no engine running and I have no music playing. So I guess if you're going to sit in the car silently, you will hear some stuff, but you just don't hear anything else. None of the other bothers of the world are getting in the way of my experience. I'm going to floor it here. It's quick. It's really, really, really fast. The steering wheel feels great. The seat feels great. The pillow, all of the mood lighting in the interior, the giant screen. I mean, this is just a damn nice car. Now, is it worth over 200 grand? I don't know. That seems a little excessive. And based on early EQS depreciation, I have a suspicion that these are going to drop in value fairly quickly and there might be some deals available. EQS, and I've said this before, really is one of my very favorite luxury EVs, in part because there's not a huge pretense of sport. You know, the Lucid Air is an amazing car, but it is, it's intended to be kind of a sporty car in addition to a luxury car. This one is just sort of lets you live in a comfortable. Oh, it's so nice. And as I get older and as I have sports cars that take care of the sport aspect of my world, this vehicles like this just become more and more and more appealing. I will say from a exterior design perspective, it is a disappointment, this car. I really think that's caused some of the negative opinions about it. I think people expect something more stately, something more, have more presence from Mercedes-Benz, especially going into the $150,000 plus luxury SUV segment. I think people want just, you know, even the GLS has a more legit upscale, luxurified look compared to this. And that's just a regular family SUV, nevermind the G-Wagon, which obviously has a lot of presence and a lot of gusto. I think that's, that's a drawback of this car. There's no question. I think they should have given it sort of more presence and more opulence in terms of its look. But if you can get past that, and I admit that's hard because if you're spending 200 grand, you want it to look like something people respect and desire. But if you can get past that, oh man, this thing is just, ah, comfortable and calm and luxurious. And I mean, it's, it, it checks the boxes that you'd expect to be checked by brands like Bentley. And it's Maybach. I mean, that's, that's the intent is to rival those brands. And, and frankly, I think it, it doesn't. It's just really, really luxurious and nice. And the materials are good and the feel is good. And the acceleration is good. And it kind of checks all of the boxes except it's quite expensive. Some of the details are a little over the top, like the Maybach wheels, and it just doesn't quite look, you know, the part of a vehicle like this, but it is still quite an impressive SUV. And so that's the new Mercedes Maybach EQS SUV Night Series. If you're looking for an electric car, but you want the ultimate in luxury, this is right up there with Lucid and the BMW i7. It's an opulent car and a surprisingly compelling one, especially if you have a driver and you want to sit in back and keep the plebeians out. Anyway, now it's time to give the Maybach EQS a Doug's score. And the Doug's score is here, 64 out of 100, which places the EQS Maybach SUV here against some sort of similar electric SUVs. The Maybach EQS is the ultimate electric Mercedes SUV, though it still suffers from generic styling and a high price tag. Based on sales, it looks like the vast majority of Mercedes-Benz buyers would rather have a G-Wagen, which occupies a similar place in Mercedes' lineup. Mercedes still has some work to do to convince buyers to go electric in this space, but the EQS Maybach is their most impressive SUV effort to date.