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Used test: Audi Q4 e-tron vs Mercedes EQA costs
You might be tempted by either of these electric SUVs, with their premium badges and attractive used prices, but which is the better buy?...
Buying and owning
Costs, equipment, reliability, safety and security
The Audi Q4 e-tron and Mercedes EQA began life as new cars at £47,090 and £45,995 respectively. As two-year-old used cars, the Q4 will set you back around £29,000 and the EQA around £25,000, so the latter car has lost slightly more money. According to our data, we expect both cars to retain a similar amount of value as they go forward, though.
The Q4 belongs to insurance group 29, so insuring it will cost around £790, according to our running cost figures. The EQA, in group 37, should cost you more – around £947. For a service of the Q4, we were quoted £328 via Audi. For the EQA, we were quoted £576 via Mercedes and that included two services.
The EQA can take up to 100kW from a suitable CCS public charger, meaning that a 10-80% top-up can take as little as 35 minutes. You'd expect the Q4, with its bigger battery, to take longer to charge but, because it can accept up to 126kW of power, the same 10-80% charge can be completed in 34 minutes.
If you’re charging at home using a regular 7kW wall box, a 0-100% charge will take around 12 hours in the Q4 and 11 hours in the EQA.
On the luxury front, both cars come with automatic climate control, ambient interior lighting, privacy glass and part-leather seats that are heated in the front. The EQA also gets a heat pump designed to improve battery efficiency (and therefore range) and warm the interior more efficiently in cooler conditions. You can have one of these in your Q4, but it was an extra £950 when new.
Both cars have been appraised for safety by Euro NCAP, although the tests were done under slightly different criteria. Each model was awarded five stars out of five, and while the Q4 did prove a little better at protecting a theoretical 10-year-old child sitting in the back, the margins were small.
Both cars come with automatic emergency braking as standard. Blindspot monitoring comes as standard on the EQA and costs extra on the Q4.
In our latest What Car? Reliability Survey, the Q4 and EQA were both too new to feature. As brands, though, Audi ranked 26th out of 32 manufacturers, while Mercedes came 24th.
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