Mercedes Junking Its EQ Badge Is Another Reminder That EVs Have Gone Mainstream

Sales of EVs might have slowed lately, but they already account for such a high percentage of overall car sales in many countries that they’re no longer the outliers. And Mercedes’ decision to call its new electric G-class the ‘G580 with EQ Technology’ rather than EQG underlines how mainstream electric cars now are.

Think back to the first wave of electric cars that appeared in the early and mid-2010s. Automakers were keen to grab attention for their new EVs so many – though not all – were designed to look wildly different from regular combustion cars. Models like the BMW i3 were bespoke electric vehicles with no combustion counterparts and appealed to early adopters with their futuristic design cues.

Related: BMW To Debut New Naming System With Neue Klasse Models

But while there are still plenty of standalone EV designs, like the Kia EV6 or Mercedes EQS, many brands are either integrating electric hardware into existing combustion models (BMW i7 and 7-Series) or making their EVs look very similar to their ICE equivalents (Porsche Macan) even when they use completely different platforms.

It’s a logical step as automakers are now chasing a second wave of EV buyers who are perhaps more conventional in their tastes and don’t necessarily want to shout about driving an EV like the pioneers of a decade ago.

And it’s not only the design of EVs and combustion cars that are becoming less different. So are their names. To make sure everybody could tell their EV cars from ICE-powered ones, even when they were just looking at a model name written on paper and couldn’t see the car, automakers came up with electric sub-brands.

BMW developed its ‘i’ prefix, Volkswagen came up with ID, and Mercedes affixed EQ letters in front of model identifiers to create cars like the EQE and EQS.

But now Mercedes is stepping back from its EV naming strategy, and other carmakers are set to follow suit, either minimizing their EV-dedicated badging or dropping them altogether. The production version of the next BMW 3-Series previewed by last year’s Vision Neue Klasse concept will be available with both electric and combustion drivetrains, the EV reportedly getting a discrete i330 badge, for example, and the combustion version the plain 330.

Likewise, VW has been making noises about ditching its ID badges. The production version of the ID.2 concept will likely be badged Golf because it’s a name that buyers know and understand. And as electric powertrains become even more commonplace – the next Golf will be EV-only, as will many other models by the end of the decade – and buyers get used to being able to choose different power sources in the same wrapper, it’s going to become less important to obviously telegraph that there’s an electric motor under the hood.

It all makes perfect sense, or it would if ‘Mercedes G580 with EQ technology‘ wasn’t such an appallingly clunky name. Sorry, Mercedes, but EQG580, or G580EQ, works so much better.