Mercedes-Benz X350 vs Xpeng G6

What's the difference?

The V6 X-Class is nice enough to drive on-road and it’s effective enough off-road, but it’s let down by its less-than-impressive interior and those elements combined certainly do not justify such a high price-tag.

Sure, its safety gear is top-notch but the X-Class, even in this V6 guise, feels like a lacklustre attempt at ute greatness, rather than a real effort. 

Right now, if you’re in the market for a super-comfortable and capable V6 ute with real class and German precision, check out a top-spec V6 Amarok – and save about $25,000 while you’re at it.

You never know quite what to expect when you jump into the first model from a brand-new brand, but the XPeng G6 was a pleasant surprise. And at this price, with these features, it should really give Tesla Model Y shoppers something to think about.

From the outside, the X-Class looks pretty impressive – it’s chunky and blocky and has a real tough-truck presence.

As mentioned, a fair few of the cool exterior touches are actually paid-for options, and our tester was loaded with these extras and, as a result, looked like a work-or-play ready luxury workhorse.

So, it looks pretty good but, as always, looks can be deceiving and the interior is a very different story.

There’s more than a little Tesla Model Y in the XPeng’s exterior design, with the two sharing the same kind of soft-edged, swept-back SUV styling. 

It helps make the XPeng look familiar and inoffensive, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ground-breaking, I think it has enough exterior flourishes to break up the body work, and I don’t mind the way it looks, and the way it sits on those big alloys.

Inside, it’s a spacious and pretty stylish space. This giant screen is super responsive, and is easy enough to navigate, with the key functions (like climate) glued to the bottom of the screen so you don't have to paw through menus to access them. The idea begins to fail when you have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto active, though, as you have to revert back to the car's home screen to access anything.

The XPeng uses its steering wheel controls to access air-con fan and temp controls as a kind of shortcut, but confusingly they change to distance adjustment when you’ve got the cruise control on. An easier, and much better solution would be to bring back buttons.

I also don't love the stalk-style gear selector, which doubles as a cruise control activator, and, with a double pull, as your autonomous helper. It just feels super old-school in a vehicle this modern.

What is a massive win though is the driver screen. Tesla fans can scream minimalist aesthetics all they want, but the drive experience is simply better when you can see your speed and other key info right in front of you.

I’m not a snob about interiors but if I spent almost $90 grand on a ute I’d expect it to have a very high level of fit and finish inside, plenty of storage options and an overall premium feeling inside.

That’s sorely lacking in here.

From the many hard-plastic surfaces, fake leather, brushed-aluminium sections and sort of half-hearted attempts at three-pointed star styling – such as the vents – no part of the interior looks or feels anything like the premium quality you’d expect to find in a Mercedes-Benz.

As for equipment inside, you get the 7.0-inch floating touchscreen and a few other bits and pieces but there are some glaring omissions: you don’t get a reach-adjustable steering wheel, heated seats, or real leather (our tester has the optional black leather seats fitted at a cost of $1750), you don’t get much in the way of storage anywhere, and you don’t get Apple CarPlay or Android Auto – you don’t even get a driver-side grab handle. All of those sort of mod cons, you get in a ute that costs much less than this X-Class. 

Room and comfort inside is adequate but a long way from unreal for something so pricey.

Driving position is nice, with plenty of vision all-round, but everyone's seats could do with a bit more cushioning and length in the base.

In the grand tradition of all utes, the rear seat is really the realm of young children and, at a stretch, smaller adults, especially for longer trips in the saddle. 

Storage is minimal in the back seat – you don’t even get a drop-down arm-rest with cup-holder.

At 4753mm in length, 1920mm in width and 1650mm in height, the XPeng fits into the fast-growing mid-size electric SUV space. 

And it ticks a lot of practicality boxes, like with its 571-litre boot, swelling to 1374 litres with the seats folded. But its real party trick is in the back seat, where the space is properly massive. 

I have another mid-size SUV, powered by a petrol engine, at the moment and our baby seat presses against the back of the passenger seat. In this it feels like I could fly a kite in the space between them.

It’s the same for passengers, too. Honestly, the real estate on offer is massive, and that includes for the middle-seat rear passenger, where the lack of a bulky tunnel eating into legroom means adults can sit there comfortably.

There's a pull-down divider separating the back seat that's also home to two cupholders, and there are twin USB connections, as well as air vents (though no temp controls).

There's no spare tyre, though, which means fiddling with the repair kit should you get puncture, or waiting for roadside assist.

Okay, first things first – what the hell is XPeng? It's been around for about 10 years in China, but only made its way to Australia last year. It was founded by some former car company execs and tech tycoons — one of whom is telecommunications billionaire He Xiaopeng, which is where that name comes from.

Anyway, this one is the XPeng G6, which launched in Australia with two trims – the Standard Range, which is $54,800, before on-road costs, and the one we’ve tested, the Long Range, which is $59,800. The difference is in the battery size, of course, but we’ll get to that in a minute. 

As of now, the new Model Y can be ordered for $63,400 for the Standard Range or $73,400 for the Long Range, which makes the XPeng a whole heap cheaper.

Outside, you get LED lighting all around (including the DRLs), a massive glass roof, auto door handles, an auto-opening boot, a V2L connection, which allows you to use your XPeng’s battery to power whatever you plug in and big 20-inch wheels wrapped in Michelin rubber.

You also get some cool high-tech features, accessed through the XPeng app, like the ability to drive your car out of tight parking spots remotely.

Inside, there are synthetic-leather seats that are heated, a heated steering wheel, dual-zone climate, a massive 18-speaker sound system (with speakers in the headrest), wireless charging and two very handy screens — a responsive 15-inch central screen with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, and a 10.2-inch digital dashboard.

There’s also more safety stuff than you can shake a crash test at, but we’ll come back to that in a second.

The V6 350d Power V6 has a Benz-built 3.0-litre diesel engine (190kW at 3400rpm and 550Nm at 1400rpm-3200rpm), matched to a Benz-built seven-speed auto. It’s a mostly smooth combination and any perceived throttle or turbo lag can be swiftly overcome through switching to one of the more sporty of the five driving modes – one of which is actually called Sport – and making judicious use of the steering-wheel-mounted paddle shifters. The other driving modes are Comfort, Eco, Manual and Off Road and all are designed to adjust throttle input, gear changes and shift times to suit the terrain.

This X-Class has Benz’s 4Matic full-time 4WD system with 4MAT (40:60 torque split for daily driving), 4H (the X-Class’s high range, with 30:70 torque split for looser surfaces) and 4L (aka low range with a 50:50 torque split to suit low-speed 4WDing). The driver uses a simple dial – unfortunately tucked away low down, almost hidden, on the centre console – to switch between these modes.

This G6 is a rear-wheel drive affair, with a single electric motor housed at the rear axle. It produces 190kW and 440Nm in Standard Range form or 210kW/440Nm in Long Range guise, which don’t sound like massive numbers — especially given the 2.0-tonne-plus weight of this XPeng – but it gets up and moving just fine.

The 100km/h sprint is a claimed 6.2 seconds, while the top speed is 200km/h.

Fuel consumption is listed as 8.8L/100km (combined). 

We recorded 10.9L/100km on test and that included plenty of low-speed 4WDing. 

The V6 X-Class has a 80-litre fuel tank. 

The Long Range version of the G6 nabs a 87.5kWh battery (compared to 66kWh in the Standard Range), unlocking a claimed driving range of 570km. 

The official power use figure is 17.5kWh/100km, but I did a fair bit of driving on all sorts of roads and my number was more like 14kWh.

When it does come time to charge, the G6 is set up for 280kW DC fast charging which means, should you find the right fast charger, a 10-80 per cent charge should arrive in just 20 minutes. Home charging will take a lot longer, of course – we’re talking overnight plugged into a regular wallbox.

Well, this is where the news gets a little bit better.

The V6 is a much better fit for the X-Class than the four-cylinder and it works well with the seven-speed auto, punching the more-than-2190kg ute along – although there is, at times, a substantial delay between foot down and go-time but, as mentioned earlier, that can be overcome by switching to Sport and using the paddle shifters.

It does sit nicely on the road, and ride and handling are generally okay with the X-Class only infrequently revealing some of the skips and jitters you’d expect of an unladen ute.

The coil-spring suspension tends to yield a spongy, comfortable ride rather than the too-firm ride of a ute, especially those of the leaf-spring variety, with nothing onboard.

Steering is pretty sharp and, despite its bulk, the X-Class is reasonably easy to manoeuvre for its size on- and off-road. It has a 12.8m turning circle.

How much you love your time behind the wheel of the XPeng G6 comes down to what you're looking for from your mid-size electric SUV.

Speed and sportiness? There's not much of either. But it does serve up tons of space and technology, surprising refinement and a calm and cosseting ride.

And I think you can mount a pretty solid argument that all of that is pretty important in a mid-size SUV, more so than the ability to carve corners.

I did some solid driving in the G6, including a round trip from Sydney to the start of the NSW South Coast, taking in every road type and surface imaginable, and XPeng proved super comfy, pretty quiet and very, very easy the entire time.

Sure, it's not one of those EVs that makes the scenery blur when you put your foot down. Its outputs and acceleration are a bit more user-friendly than that. But it also doesn't ever feel underpowered, with the plenty of poke away from the lights and even some in reserve for freeway overtakes at 110km/h.

The steering, even in its 'Dynamic' mode, is fairly soft, and you can never magic away the weight of the XPeng in corners, where that compliant suspension does allow for some roll, but it also doesn't feel entirely disconnected from the road below in that disconcerting way some vehicles can.

So, if comfort is mission critical in your SUV space, the XPeng delivers.

Oh, and I know that big screens aren't that uncommon these days, but the multimedia unit in the XPeng is a treat. It's super fast, even when scrolling across maps, and it's relatively user friendly, too.

The XPeng G6 wears a maximum five-star ANCAP safety rating from assessment in 2024, owing mostly to a flood of active safety features that arrive as standard, including AEB (with pedestrian, backover, cyclist, motorcycle and crossing detection), lane departure warning, lane keep assist, speed sign recognition, driver monitoring and more.

But it could also lay claim to a unique record – the first Chinese EV in which the safety systems don't make you want to make you pull your hair out with their incessant chiming and bonging.

Only on the freeway, where an intermittent chiming incorrectly warned me I was leaving my lane, were the safety systems at all overzealous. Otherwise, they were entirely liveable.

If a crash is unavoidable, the airbag count runs to seven (dual front, front side, side curtain and front centre) and multi-collision brake is standard, to minimise the chances of a secondary crash following an initial impact.

A three-year/200,00km warranty applies to this ute. Service intervals are up to one year/20,000km.

I'm scoring the regular warranty offering here, which is five years or 120,000km, with the battery covered for eight years or 160,000km. Keep an eye out for deals, though. At the time of writing XPeng was offering a 10-year warranty on both, for example.

Service intervals are 12 months or 20,000km. The cheapest individual service is $238, but over five years the total cost is $2064, averaging out to more like $410 per year.