Mercedes EQS dash is bigger than most TVs | FOS Future Lab

The display is in effect the entire dashboard, a three-dimensionally curved glass panel with different displays blending seamlessly together. Even the circular air vents at the extremities appear to be set into it (the vents are real by the way, not virtual).

There are separate display areas for driver and passenger and the whole thing is customisable with seven different profiles. The bad news? The Hyperscreen will not be standard but a cost option, and no we don’t know what the cost will be.

As anyone who has driven a new Mercedes since about 2018 can guess, the “Hey Mercedes” user experience is the brains behind the beauty. But in the EQS you won’t even have to say Hey Mercedes. That’s thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) in the latest version of MBUX, already previewed on the new combustion-engined S-Class (which will continue alongside the electric model).

According to Mercedes, AI means the EQS will get to know you, and learn your funny little ways, without your even having to summon the machine by voice or having to scroll through sub menus. Instead, we are promised a “zero layer” where personalised suggestions for various functions are “always offered in a situational and contextual way”. That’s complicated Mercedes-speak for saying the car will be easy to operate.

Mercedes gives a few examples of how the EQS will do the thinking for you. Useful more than life-affirming perhaps, they range from remembering which massage seat function you prefer at a certain time on a certain day, to making a regular phone call to automatically raising the body on its height-adjustable suspension so you don’t grind its bottom on that pesky ramp into your driveway.

For Merc’s chief design guru Gorden Wagener it’s all a design vision that has become reality. “If technology can do a lot but I have to work out the usage, I always stay at a distance. Our success is based on the idea that it must work just as well as it looks.”

We look forward to giving it a go… as we do the whole EQS. What else do we know about this debut electric version of the world’s top selling luxury car? Pictures of it wearing camouflage currently doing the online rounds show it keeps the radically different proportions of the Vision concept car from 2019.

Its stretched “one bow” arc profile with long cabin and short bonnet and boot will make this a very different looking limo from the regular S-Class’s more three-box silhouette. A long wheelbase and likely flat floor should make it as spacious inside as any S-Class, perhaps more spacious.

The EQS is tipped for an unveiling in the autumn of 2021, a rival for the Tesla Model S and, fingers crossed, a reborn electric Jaguar XJ (which was scheduled to have been previewed in 2020). In the EQS expect a base model to have a dual motor, all-wheel-drive set-up with around 470PS (346kW) offering 0-62mph in 4.5 seconds but – far more crucially – a range of 435miles (700km) on a single charge.

Welcome to FOS Future Lab where we report on the latest visions of future technology. We'll be boldly covering flying cars, hoverboards, jetpacks and spaceships with plenty of down to earth topics in between.