The Mercedes GLC Electric Drove 393 Miles Mostly On Highways With One Quick Charge

Its calculated range was only 273 miles of mostly highway driving. A single lunch charging stop helped it cover nearly 400.

Photo by: Autocritica

By: Andrei Nedelea

Sep 18, at 8:02am ET

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The Mercedes GLC Electric covered 393 miles with one 17-minute charging session during lunch.
Its observed consumption translated into 273 miles of calculated range from its 94-kWh usable battery.
Its excellent fast-charging performance helped the GLC fit a long driving day around a normal lunch break.

An electric car doesn’t need 400 miles of range to make a 400-mile road trip easy. If it charges quickly, that can also bridge the gap, as the new Mercedes-Benz GLC EV showed during yesterday’s leg of the Eurocharge by Schaeffler EV road trip.

This was the road trip’s third day, and it saw all eight EVs driving from Tata in Hungary to Turracher Höhe in the Austrian Alps. The GLC 400 4Matic covered 632 km (393 miles) in total, 80% of which was on the highway, mostly done at 130 km/h (80.7 mph).

Photo by: Autocritica

The GLC started with a full battery and drove 308 kilometers (191 miles) to an EnBW Smatrics charging station in Melk, Austria, which it reached with 31% remaining. Hooked up to a 400-kilowatt charger, it went from 31% to 81% in 17 minutes, with a peak observed charging power of 275 kW. That’s not quite the 330 kW Mercedes advertises, but we didn’t precondition the battery on the way to the charger, and we’ve already seen it exceed its peak power rating in ideal conditions.

The charging session put 51 kilowatt-hours back into the battery, with a very respectable average charging power of 180 kW. The GLC then covered another 324 kilometers (201 miles), reaching the hotel with 7% remaining, and the battery was replenished overnight. The last leg of the journey was mostly twisty mountain roads with stunning switchbacks and perfect tarmac, which you can really enjoy thanks to the GLC’s excellent chassis. So even if we weren’t going at highway speeds anymore, the drive up to the hotel was still pretty brisk and not efficiency-minded.

By the end of the day, the average consumption was 21.4 kWh/100 km, or around 2.9 miles/kWh. Using that average consumption and knowing the battery’s 94-kWh usable capacity gives a calculated full-battery range of 439 kilometers (273 miles).

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That’s just an estimate for these conditions, rather than a distance established by driving from full to flat. Mercedes says the GLC 400 EV is rated at up to 673 km (418 miles), but you would have to avoid highways and drive gently on slower roads to bring electricity consumption down to 15.8 kWh/100 km (3.93 miles/kWh) to match it.

Of all the eight EVs taking part in this road trip, the Mercedes required the least charging to reach its destination. However, starting battery percentages differed, as did the charging strategies, so these figures shouldn’t be treated as a controlled road-trip ranking. Still, driving nearly 400 miles of driving, mostly on highways and swift mountain passes, with one short charging session that coincided with lunch, is pretty impressive. The day wouldn’t have looked too different in a comparable combustion car.