Mercedes SLS AMG Gullwing Electric – Official

There’s been a few bits and pieces to report on the Mercedes SLS AMG this last week. We had a release of teaser images of the Mercedes SLS and the first ‘Official’ looking image of the Mercedes SLS from a magazine cover. But one piece we reported on was the Mercedes SLS AMG Electric which, on the basis of the information we had, seemed more like speculation than fact. But Mercedes has come out and issued a press release confirming that they are indeed working on an electric SLS.

As we suggested the other day, it looks like this will be known as the Mercedes SLS AMG eDrive. It will feature an in-board electric motor for each wheel, generating the equivalent of  526bhp, which should give the SLS eDrive similar performance to its conventionally driven sibling.

By putting a motor at each corner, Mercedes are effectively endowing the SLS eDrive with an intelligent four wheel drive system. Power will be via plug-in, but no mention has been made of charging times or range (which was our quibble with the initial information we had.). We guess that the rapiudly developing technology makes a prediction of the charging and range all but impossible to predict.

By designing the SLS to accommodate an electric drivetrain from concept stage, Mercedes has been able to push forward with the SLS eDrive without any major modifications to the car’s structure. They are going to use the defunct (in the eDrive) central tunnel to house big, liquid-cooled lithium-ion batteries that can store up to 48KWh.

And what’s also refreshing is that Mercedes have stated that the SLS AMG eDrive is not particularly about climate responsibility, but about redifining the the supercar for the future and still offering AMG performance.

Good news.