The electric Mercedes with a range to die for

As a pubescent teenager back in the late 1970s, I was delighted to once find a discarded copy of The Sun newspaper on a tube train, handily folded back to reveal page three.

Having admired Miranda from Epping my eyes shifted to the report of a court case in which a retired brigadier had been stopped on the M1 motorway for driving his sporty Rover 3500S at a reckless 102 mph.

His defence? That he had been listening to Rossini’s rousing William Tell Overture on the car’s eight-track sound system and become so carried away that he simply kept accelerating – a scenario that was supported by the arresting police officer who confirmed that the defendant, in addition to travelling at almost 50 per cent above the speed limit, also appeared to have been conducting an imaginary orchestra from behind the wheel.

The story sprang to mind the other day when I was driving the recently-launched Mercedes-Benz EQS a car that, while perhaps not a true ‘limousine’, is one of the first properly premium electric vehicles to hit the market.