In yet another significant milestone for Mercedes-Benz Malaysia (MBM), the company today officially announced that the Mercedes-Benz Pekan production plant has begun to roll out Mercedes EQ all-electric vehicles. The announcement took place just several months after MBM revealed the local assembly plan during the launch of the EQE sedan late last year.
This particular facility which has been in operation for the past 19 years has rolled out more than 100,000 Mercedes-Benz vehicles to date. While one may though that the first rollout of Malaysian-made EQ vehicles would be the entry-level EQA, that isn’t the case at all. Instead, the first EQ model to be assembled in Pekan is the flagship executive sedan EQS.
This made Pekan as the third oversea Mercedes-Benz assembly facility to work on EQS after Pune in India and Thailand’s Samut Prakan. Not only that, the variant that Mercedes-Benz chose as the first Made-In-Pekan EQ model is the EQS 500 4MATIC which is a more powerful model than the fully imported EQS 450+ that was launched in Malaysia last year.
First announced to the world last April, the EQS 500 4MATIC brings together all-wheel-drive capability alongside an increased amount of power at 300kW and 855Nm of torque. As a comparison, the EQS 450+ was a rear-wheel-drive model with 245kW of power and 568Nm of torque.
However, the variant still carries the same 107.8kWh battery as per EQS 450+. Naturally, the increase in performance has reduced the EQS 500 4MATIC’s range although still quite respectable at between 580km to 696km, as opposed to the EQS 450+ which is able to cover between 631km to 782km.
Being locally assembled, there is a price advantage though as the Pekan-made EQS 500 4MATIC will be available for sale at RM648,888. That is a significant difference as compared to the current price tag of EQS 450+ which is RM708,888.
In terms of market rollout, the new locally-assemble EQS 500 4MATIC will be available this coming March. Once that happened, this will be the EQS focus model for MBM moving forward.
