Ford Transit Custom vs Mercedes-Benz Eqe53

What's the difference?

The Ford Transit Custom Trail has plenty of appeal as a work van or a camper fit-out candidate. It’s a well-packaged, comfortable and contemporary van that’s nice to drive and as a bonus, with all-wheel drive it’s given the scope of capability to be able to tackle mild off-roading situations with confidence.

It’s built for work and play and though it’s limited to two-up for travels, the Trail offers so much potential as a camper conversion for adventure seekers its few niggles are easily forgotten when you’re busy making memories.

In the wild new world of fully electric cars there isn’t really an ‘average’ of what to expect. If there was, I’m sure the EQE 53 would exceed it. Its electrification brings the ambiance of a luxury car, while its performance reminds you of what AMG is capable of.

There’s a bit of the mechanical engagement of AMG missing, a relatively small boot, and some won’t be sold on the function-over-form looks, but the EQE 53 is a pleasantly surprising look at the future of fast Mercedes.

It looks like a van but with some striking yet low-key flourishes that all kind of work as a whole. Those include a Trail grille and the matt black alloy wheels. The yellow sticker-pack is a neat touch.

The Trail has more presence than a regular Trend with its 30mm-taller raised suspension and overall adventure-ready look with strong front end and chunky wheel arches.

The striking but low-key theme continues inside with a neatly laid-out yet spartan cabin. The two synthetic leather seats are topped with Trail embossing and lined with yellow stitching.

The cabin is separated from the rear cargo area by a bulkhead, which incorporates a small wired window.

The EQE is certainly a departure from the classic lines of the current E-Class sedan. Mercedes-Benz has chosen to take a completely new approach for the electric era, embracing the need for ultra-low drag designs, and a corresponding newfound love for curvaceous surfaces.

It’s fairly imposing too with enormous wheels and an abundance of panels. Needless to say some will find this new design direction challenging. It proved quite controversial in the CarsGuide office, at any rate.

I can say it looks a bit more approachable when witnessed in the metal, and the AMG branded 53s I sampled for this review added a few more much-needed points of interest to this single curve of a design.

This is particularly notable around the rear of the EQE 53 which adds a little tail spoiler and glossy rear diffuser, which help accentuate the width and terraced design of the rear window.

Around the front is a little more featureless, with the blanked-out grille losing the intricate three-dimensional appeal of this car’s combustion equivalents. There’s just something a bit plain about the EQE’s face, although Mercedes has tried to spice it up with interesting headlight clusters.

The inside is spectacular, with a smorgasbord of screens and lights to match an abundance of glossy touch-based surfaces. Some may not be sold on the over-the-top approach, but it feels as futuristic as an EV should be.

The material choices are nice, too, with soft-touch materials atop the dash, doors, and running down the centre console. The ambient lighting is particularly flashy, and works in with the consistent single-piece sort of design which makes up the whole dash.

While the LEDs might be a little too much for some, there are some more subtle detailing points, like the way the centre air vents are delicately worked into the flow of the dash, and the rotor designs of each vent at the edges are intricate pieces.

It’s a van so there are two distinct sections to the Trail, the cabin and the load space.

Firstly, the cabin. More a work-friendly than family-friendly interior, this Trail is a two-seater with plenty of durable plastic everywhere – ready for work and life – as well as charging (with USB-A and -C ports) and storage (including a van-favourite dash-top slot for logbooks etc, outboard moulded cupholders and a nifty pop-out cupholder), all amenities enough to cope with most daily van-related duties.

The seats are comfortable, supportive and have a fold-down lock-in-place armrest.

Now for the load space. There are no seats back there and as such it has plenty of potential as a work van or touring vehicle.

Access to the rear load space is via a barn door at the back and this Trail has a sliding door on both sides.

The cargo area is substantial – 3002mm long (to the bulkhead; 3450mm long if load-through hatch is used), 1392mm wide (between wheel arches) and 1425mm high (floor to roof). Easily big enough for work equipment or recreational gear. It can cope with four Euro pallets (each measuring 1200mm x 800mm) and it has a listed maximum load volume (with the bulkhead) of 6.8 cubic metres.

Load height through the rear barn doors is 531-585mm, depending on how much weight is already onboard.

The load space has the aforementioned metal bulkhead (with window and load-through hatch), load area protection kit (full height walls and moulded floor), LED lights and eight tie-down loops.

Otherwise, this is a load area ripe for customisation. Maybe a plethora of shelves for a tradie, or some bedding and extra storage for an adventurous person or couple.

The EQE is plenty practical up front, with an odd SUV-like seating position providing a commanding view of the road. This seat positioning isn’t an accident or a necessity of facilitating batteries under the floor, but a deliberate design decision by the brand to try to emulate some design choices which have made SUVs so popular.

The result is surprisingly effective, but doesn’t help the view out of the rear of the car, which is a restricted letterbox aspect courtesy of a slinky roofline and tall boot lid.

Still, peering down on the road lets you position and park this large EV more easily. Adjustability isn’t bad for the front passenger, and space is healthy both in terms of width and height. One dimension which can’t be altered is the particularly tall dash height, and while this is largely overcome by the taller-than-average seat, it could be an issue for shorter drivers.

Storage is great, with a big bottle holder and bin in the doors, a huge cutaway below the floating centre console for storage, with an elastic strap for tying down objects. There are a further two bottle holders in the centre console and a bay with a wireless charger, too, and the split-opening armrest box is deep.

One of the more divisive points of this car’s practicality offering is the screen-based functions. Everything has been moved into the massive centre screen. There are no tactile buttons or dials for this car’s functions, with it all controlled through context menus.

To be fair, with the amount of real estate on offer, the touch elements can afford to be massive, and there is a permanent set of climate controls at the base of the screen, but adjusting these functions on the fly is never as easy without physical feedback.

The same goes for the touch-centric wheel controls. Benz says the idea with the four-zoned touch panels on the wheel is to offer unrivalled ability to control the car’s functions even when the wheel is at an angle, but it is also easy to accidentally hit various touch functions, and they can require some delicate action to use properly.

The back seat is impressive. It maintains the tall seating position of the front, letting you look down on the road as though you’re in an SUV, and the comfortable seating and surfaces continue. Legroom is particularly impressive, with leagues of space behind my own driving position. Headroom is even okay considering the descending roofline. It’s quite dark in the EQE 53 we tested thanks to its black-on-black trim, giving the illusion of a space which is smaller than it actually is.

Storage is good, too, with a big bottle holder in the door cards, quad-zone climate control, complete with a separate touch panel for rear passengers, adjustable air vents, and solid clamshell pockets on the backs of the front seats.

The EQE has a boot capacity of 430 litres which doesn’t seem enormous given the footprint of this car, and no doubt has a lot to do with its slinky aerodynamic design around the rear. There’s no ‘frunk’ either so this is a car perhaps more focused on driving and being driven in than its ability to carry things.

We don’t yet know which EQE variants will be offered in Australia. The car we drove for this review, the EQE 53 AMG is the top of the range, and will be the launch variant in Australia, but the brand is yet to settle on how it will fill the line-up underneath.

Representatives said to expect at least two more Mercedes-Benz (as opposed to AMG) branded variants, with the option of a rear-wheel drive entry model and an all-wheel drive mid-grade. Whether they adopt the same spec level as the European-market EQE 350 remains to be seen.

As for the EQE 53, CarsGuide understands a price north of $200,000 is likely when it arrives before the end of 2022.

Its rivals will include other high-end four-door models like the Porsche Taycan, Audi e-tron GT, and the updated Tesla Model S. In the coming years this segment will continue to heat up with the yet-to-launch Hyundai Ioniq 6 and Polestar 5.

The EQE is fairly large, offering dimensions comparable to that of the CLS which came before it, and is quite unconventional in a host of areas.

The standard suite of equipment we sampled is impressive, too, with performance enhancements on the 53 including four-wheel steer, adaptive dampers, a performance brake package, and torque-vectoring all-wheel drive.

Massive 21-inch alloy wheels featured on our car, and there is also the option overseas for even higher performance carbon ceramic brakes.

Outside also features LED headlights, DRLs, and tail-lights, while inside impresses with the massive dash-spanning ‘Hyperscreen’ with panels for the digital dash, centre multimedia screen, and a third panel for the front passenger.

This set-up is optional on the EQE range in Europe, but we’ll have to wait and see what becomes standard for the Australian market. The car we sampled had wireless phone mirroring tech, wireless charging pads, built-in navigation with augmented reality directions, a head-up display with configurable panels, and full USB-C connectivity throughout.

Quad-zone climate also features, as does the brand’s latest steering wheel, in our case clad in Alcantara and leather trim.

The seats, even on the EQE 53 ship standard with the ‘Artico’ synthetic leather trim, although they can also optionally be upgraded to full Nappa leather. Electrical adjustment is standard for the front seats.

It’s a flashy cabin which feels primo, and little touches like unique materials for the EQ range across the dash and ambient lighting configurable to any colour you can dream up are neat, too.

Check in closer to the EQE’s local arrival time before the end of 2022 for more accurate pricing and spec, as well as the list of option packs.

The Ford Transit Custom Trail has a 2.0-litre four-cylinder turbo-diesel engine producing 125kW at 3500rpm and 390Nm at 1750-2500rpm.

The Trail has a clever eight-speed automatic transmission and an on-demand all-wheel drive system.

It all works rather well, but it’s a van afterall and as such it is less dynamic and more dependably driveable than perhaps a cross-shopped SUV wagon. However, as an AWD van the Trail can be trusted to keep its grip on wet bitumen, soggy grass and loosely-gravelled tracks and that’s a strong part of its appeal over a 2WD van.

The EQE 53 punches out huge power, with the standard car producing 460kW/950Nm from its dual electric motor set-up, or with the 'AMG Dynamic Plus Pack', producing even higher figures of 505kW/1000Nm.

Clearly, AMG’s electric vehicles will safely outrun their dramatic combustion predecessors. In fact, with the Plus Pack, the EQE 53 is capable of moving its bulk from 0-100km/h in just 3.2 seconds. Extreme for something carrying a whopping 90.6kWh of batteries under the floor.

Enhancements include torque-vectoring all-wheel drive, all-wheel steer, adaptive dampers, and the choice of standard performance brakes or a carbon ceramic package.

The Ford Transit Custom Trail has an official combined cycle (urban/extra-urban) fuel consumption figure of 8.5L/100km. On this test I recorded 8.8L/100km.

The Trail has a 70-litre fuel tank so going by my on-test fuel figure you could reasonably expect a driving range of about 795km from a full tank of diesel. However, as with any vehicle, once you’ve loaded the Trail with real-world burdens (e.g kids, dogs, camping gear, etc) you’ll soon see that fuel consumption increase.

Electric vehicles appear to have the same issues as their combustion counterparts, in that they still drop in efficiency the more powerful you make them. In the case of the EQE 53, this means an average WLTP-rated consumption number between 20.3kWh/100km and 23.2kWh/100km.

'Thirsty' for an EV, although it is on par with the Porsche Taycan and still below Audi’s e-tron S.

When it comes to charging the EQE 53 can charge at a rate of 11kW on the AC standard, or a whopping 170kW on DC - allowing 180km of range to be added every 15 minutes. It also has the convenient option of a 22kW AC charger, a welcome inclusion if you intend to charge your car often at public outlets.

Total range for the 90.6kWh battery is 513km on the WLTP cycle.

It’s easy to get in and out of the Trail’s driver seat with a wide-opening door and a big step to help you inside.

The seats are comfortable and it’s simple enough to dial-in your driving position via the tilt-and-reach adjustable steering wheel and manually-adjustable seat.

Word of warning: the auto transmission is operated via a stalk mounted on the right-hand side of the steering wheel column, which takes some getting used to.

Once underway, the Trail is punchy enough around town and in the suburbs with its 2.0L 'EcoBlue' turbo-diesel engine offering a more-than-adequate amount of power and torque (125kW and 390Nm) and its clever auto helping out with nifty moves through traffic (for a van, anyway).

Visibility is impressive from the cabin and you’re afforded a convenient vantage point with the Trail standing a bit taller than its regular Transit Custom stablemates as it’s on lifted suspension, but feeling composed on most surfaces.

The Trail has a listed kerb weight of 2046kg and a turning circle of 12.1m, pretty standard for a long wheelbase van, so this is not an insubstantial vehicle and it’s a bit tricky to 'flip a u-ee' if the situation demands it.

It has six drive modes – 'Normal', 'Eco', 'Slippery', 'Tow/Haul', 'Sport', 'Trail' – which each adjust engine torque, throttle response and traction control, among other things, to suit the road surface and conditions.

But we’re all here to see how it goes off-road, aren’t we?

Well, obviously this is no rock-crawling machine and it’s not intended to be. It’s best thought of as having an all-wheel drive system that gives this van mild off-road capabilities, as in it can tackle wet bitumen, soggy grass, lightly corrugated bush tracks and very shallow mud puddles with more confidence than the Transit Custom Trend it's based on.

In a nutshell, the AWD Trail will be able to handle most low-level traction-compromised scenarios. But it does not have enough ground clearance, wheel articulation, grip or underbody protection to tackle any terrain beyond modest off-roading.

Speaking of grip, the Trail as standard rides on Bridgestone Duravis R660 (215/65 R16) rubber, a van/light truck commercial tyre and they are not so well suited to dirt tracks and the like. Grippier all-terrain tyres would help this van perform slightly better off-road than on its showroom rubber.

In its favour, the Trail has a front skid plate and underbody protection in case it cops some knock from the ground during its adventures.

Not in its favour, however, especially as a potential touring vehicle, is the fact it has a space-saver spare wheel and tyre.

If you’re thinking of using your Trail as a tourer, it’s worth knowing payload is listed as 1179kg, maximum braked trailer towing capacity is 2500kg, Gross Vehicle Mass (GVM) is 3225kg and GCM is 5725kg.

The way the EQE 53 drives was deeply unexpected. Just looking at this massive sedan, I would have expected it to feel burdened by its batteries, and with its length and shape, cumbersome in the corners. That wasn’t the case at all.

The EQE 53 feels remarkably coherent from behind the wheel. The seating position works well to give a nice view of the road, the steering feels a tad artificial but still direct with some AMG magic having worked its way in.

What surprised me most is how agile it feels. Once you gather some speed and attack some corners, this car shrinks. Control is excellent thanks to the massive tyres, all-wheel drive system, and all-wheel steering. It sounds like a lot of complexity, but you don’t notice any of it. Each system does its part to allow you to simply point the car where you want it to go at pretty much any speed. It is very impressive.

The ride feels supple, too, thanks to adaptive dampers, but offers plenty of control. The speed is Tesla-style violent. Put your foot to the floor in Sport or Sport+ mode and you’re thrown to the back of your seat as the car enters a state of warp. AMG says there won’t be a 63 version of this car, and I can’t imagine why you could possibly need anything faster or more capable than this 53 version. 1000Nm of torque!

This overwhelming number perhaps makes it more impressive that it’s hard to extract a squeak from the tyres. Sure there’s torque-vectoring magic at play, but even at full acceleration they hold on for dear life.

It also makes a noise. AMG is very specific about what went into making the soundscape for the EQE because in the electric era its performance can be achieved silently, and the brand knows full well its badge usually comes hand-in-hand with aural drama.

I stuck it in the stock mode and varied my driving from 'Comfort' to 'Sport+.' The sound builds as the car gains speed, but it also interacts with your accelerator and brake inputs, as well as being one of few EVs with a specific noise for regenerative braking. It sounds… odd.

There’s certainly a kind of drama to it, and to me, it’s better to have it as a way of gaining some feedback from the car. But, its artificial nature and loudness became a little too much for sustained driving in Sport + mode. I found the best balance in the more regular ‘Sport’ mode, or even toned down to ‘Balanced’ which puts it in the background.

This leaves quite a void, though. While the sound is welcome, and the throttle alarming, there’s just something missing from the usually brash AMG badge promise.

As an EV, the EQE 53 has three regen modes quite distinct from one another. Mercedes says the choice to have just three modes is deliberate, as it didn’t want to dilute the personality of the car with an overwhelming choice of regen. The three modes include: basically no regen, moderate regen, and the full regen, essentially a single-pedal driving mode. I preferred the strongest setting for efficiency's sake (plus it brakes for you as you let off!).

The EQE 53 is surprising in so many areas, and much more engaging to drive than its exterior visage might suggest. I’m impressed.

We don’t yet know what standard safety equipment will arrive on Australian-delivered EQE variants, but you can expect a high-end suite of gear including auto emergency braking to freeway speeds, lane and blind spot assistance, driver and road monitoring tech, as well as the brand’s rather good autonomous cruise suite.

The EQE pairs the expected set of airbags with an additional driver’s knee airbag and centre airbag for some markets, as well as a second set of side impact airbags for rear passengers. There are dual ISOFIX mounts on the rear outboard seats, and expect there to be the usual three top-tether mounts in Australia, too.

Stay tuned closer to the EQE’s arrival toward the end of 2022 for more accurate specification.

Ford’s five-year/unlimited kilometre warranty applies to the Trail.

Servicing is set down for every 12 months or 30,000km and capped-price servicing is offered. Four scheduled services will set you back $2000 (including a brake fluid change at year three) which isn't over the top for a vehicle of this type.

Ford Australia has about 195 independent Ford dealers in Australia, with many located in metropolitan or suburban areas.

Mercedes-Benz in Australia currently offers a range-wide five-year and unlimited kilometre warranty, a standard which is spreading to other premium brands.

We don’t know what the service schedule or running costs will look like for the EQE range yet, but expect it to be most affordable when chosen with a multi-year prepaid service plan at the time of purchase. Check back closer to its launch time to see the full details.