Mercedes EQS SUV Enters Production in Alabama

White, lozenge-shaped electric SUV drives on a curvy desert road.

Now this bad boy is in production.Photo: Mercedes-Benz

Mercedes’ EQS sedan is amazing. It’s got an incredible interior, excellent performance and build quality that should make the folks building cars in Fremont openly weep. Of course, suppository-shaped sedans aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and for those folks, Mercedes is doing an SUV version, which just started production in Alabama, according to an announcement made by Mercedes on Friday.

Yep, the EQS SUV – which we’ve known about for a while now – is being built at Benz’s Tuscaloosa factory, which has been the home of most of its SUV production since the 1990s. It’ll be the first EV to come off the lines there, too, but it won’t be the last. Mercedes already has plans to build the smaller, more affordable EQE SUV there, and there may even be a Maybach SUV EV somewhere in the plant’s future as well.

Mercedes’ plans to build EVs in the US aren’t exactly thrown-together, last-minute kinds of plans either. The company has a battery production facility in nearby Bibb County, which opened in March. This proximity should make production easier and cheaper, and that’s always good.

Mercedes expects to get the EQS SUV to dealers sometime before the end of 2022, with pricing somewhere just north of where the EQS sedan starts (which is around $103,360 for the base Premium trim). Range is estimated to peak at 373 miles, and power output tops out at 536 on the top-tier 580 model.