Tuesday, 8.43am, Milton Keynes Coachway: Britain’s latest and most powerful electric car charging station, installed by Ionity in a corner of Milton Keynes’ park and ride bus station, consists of four charging bays. And right now, it just so happens that we’ve got four EVs with batteries to brim ahead of an Autocar group test with a twist. What luck.  Pretty soon, the brand-new Mercedes-Benz EQC that I’ve brought along – the newest boy in the electric luxury car class – is joined by fairly recent arrival the Audi E-tron, electric SUV old boy the Tesla Model X and current class favourite the Jaguar I-Pace. With the hum of flowing current and cooling fans that duly ensues, it’s as if we’re in some giant, open-air computer server cupboard.  Plugged in and topped up, the Tesla makes the grandest promises – 287 miles of battery range advertised, compared with only 226 miles for both the Audi and Jaguar, joint least. Will any of those advertised range figures be enough to complete our planned convoy road trip to the Severn Estuary and back, though? And over the next 250 miles and 36 hours, which of these cars will prove itself to be the most practical, usable and all-round convincing electric luxury car in a newly metal-swollen niche of the market?  Today, we’re heading to the Severn Bridge to overnight, via some dependably good roads for photography and driving, as a test of real-world, mixed-route energy efficiency and range. Tomorrow, we’ll turn around and head back, testing the current reliability and scope of the UK’s rapid charging network, as well as the various respective capacities of our cars to access and navigate it. Much as it would make life simple to say, here and now, that the first car to return to the point from which we’re about to depart will be our winner, I suspect the truth won’t be quite so straightforward.  10:52am, A34, near Oxford: It’s a good car, this Mercedes – quicker and more engaging than I reckoned a few months ago after driving it abroad – and yet classy, comfortable, spacious, rich and quiet.   Right now, it’s wafting serenely around the Oxford bypass as part of a four-car convoy that few will hear coming, but that plenty will notice passing. Not that those onlookers will all have nice things to say about the sight of the Mercedes. Photographer Olgun Kordal had it about right when he described the EQC as looking like a GLC “that has been left in the oven too long”. Shame. The Audi is considerably smarter to my eyes, the Tesla marginally less so, with its bulbous proportions and its slightly incongruous sloping roofline.  But it’s the Jaguar that’s the bedroom wall material. Chucking it in among its direct competition only serves to underline what a stellar job was done on the I-Pace’s design and how much more interesting an object it is to behold than pretty much anything else like it.  Well, can’t sit here and admire it all day. As we peel off west towards Wantage, onto smaller and more testing A- and B-roads, I flag down a colleague and swap into the I-Pace. And how great to be reminded what a treat this car is to drive. As well as feeling a good deal lighter, tauter handling, more immediate and more agile than the EQC, it’s got wonderfully tactile and supremely well-weighted steering. And it rides uncommonly well, with a decent sense of cushioning even on 22in rims, and a present but entirely tolerable amount of road noise. For performance, it’s right up there: the EQC’s torque might allow it to pick up more briskly from roundabout pace, but the Jaguar’s almost as quick from low speed.  Holding up on some local country roads we know well gives a chance to hop into all four cars for back-to-back comparisons of the driving experiences they offer – as well as to take some action photographs. My suspicions about the Audi E-tron prove correct: it weighs marginally less than the EQC and yet it feels bigger and heavier because its softer all-corner air suspension and steering are plainly tuned more for comfort and isolation than for handling dynamism. The E-tron is very good at smothering bumps, filtering surface coarseness and making you relax at the wheel. As everyone in the road trip party agrees, though, it’s not nearly as engaging as either the EQC or the I-Pace.  Ask the same party to choose the car they’d drive every day, and without a second thought for where or how, and the result’s equally unanimous: Jaguar, please.  3:32, westbound M4, near Swindon: Our little electric caravan is doing just fine, although since it hasn’t yet been running for a full hundred miles, so it should be. After a few hours, for photos and a bite of lunch, we’re on our way west, taking in our first few motorway miles of the trip and homing in on our final destination for the day: the Alveston House Hotel just north of Bristol.  My first few miles of the trip in the Tesla have just been followed by another few miles in the Audi – and you couldn’t have picked a pair
Origin: Electric SUV megatest: Mercedes EQC vs luxury rivals