Mercedes G 580 Charging cable

The Mercedes-Benz G 580 with EQ Technology is the fully electric G-Class, and it keeps everything that makes a G a G: the ladder frame, the boxy silhouette, the wading depth and the approach angles. What changed is underneath. Four permanent-magnet synchronous motors, one at each wheel, produce a combined 587 PS and 1,164 Nm with no mechanical differentials anywhere in the car, which is how it manages the G-Turn and pivots on its own axis. The 116 kWh battery sits inside the frame in a torsion-resistant casing and gives up to 473 km on the WLTP cycle. The CCS2 socket is on the right rear, exactly where the fuel filler sits on a combustion G, and the onboard charger takes 11 kW across three phases or 7.4 kW on a single phase.

Charging a 116 kWh battery at home

This is the first electric car in the G-Class line, and that changes what charging means. On a plug-in hybrid a slow socket is a bonus. Here it is the only way the car moves. At 11 kW from a three-phase supply a full charge takes around 12 hours, and at 7.4 kW on a single phase around 17 hours, so overnight is the normal rhythm rather than the exception. In practice almost nobody runs a battery this size to empty and refills it in one go: a typical day's driving is a two or three hour top-up, not an overnight marathon.

For longer journeys the car does its serious charging on DC, where it takes up to 200 kW and covers 10 to 80 per cent in about 32 minutes. That runs through the charge point's own tethered lead and has no bearing on which cable you buy. What your cable decides is the speed of every charge that happens where the car is parked, which on a G-Class is most of them.

Choosing a cable for a single-phase home

British homes are supplied on a single phase, and a typical wallbox delivers 7.4 kW at 32A. This charger will take all of it, which is not true of every 11 kW three-phase unit: rather than dropping to 16A when only one phase is present, it accepts the full 32A on a single line. Reaching that rate needs a cable rated to carry 32A per conductor, so our 22 kW Type 2 cable is the one we recommend to UK owners. It gives the full 7.4 kW at home and the full 11 kW at any three-phase public post. A 16A-per-conductor cable would hold a single-phase session to 3.7 kW, and on a battery of this size that is the difference between an overnight charge and a two-day one.

An 11 kW cable is the right choice if your charging is mostly done on three-phase posts, where it reaches the same 11 kW in a lighter cable. On length, Mercedes did something useful here: rather than adding a boot compartment, it repurposed the spare-wheel box on the tailgate as the cable locker, so your cable lives directly beside the charge port on the right rear. Six metres is enough where the car can be reversed square to the wallbox. Eight metres is the safer choice if the charger sits at the front of the bay or on the far wall, and given how much space a G-Class needs to manoeuvre, that is often the case. Ten and fifteen metres cover shared driveways, farmyards and public bays where you take the space you are given.

Charging where the G actually goes

A G-Class spends its life in places wallboxes have not reached. Estates, farms, worksites, ski chalets, hunting lodges. Two of those three sockets are more useful here than on any car we have written about, so it is worth being precise about what each one adds rather than how long it takes to fill 116 kWh. Our 11 kW portable charger plugs into a 16A red commando socket and gives the car its full 11 kW, which is roughly 36 km of range for every hour connected. Leave it overnight at a farm or a workshop and you wake up to a full battery, at the same speed as a three-phase public post. That socket is genuinely common in exactly the places this car goes.

The blue 16A commando charger runs at 3.7 kW and adds around 12 km per hour, so a campsite hookup or a marina berth returns roughly 145 km across a twelve-hour stop, which is a proper day's driving recovered from a bollard. For everything else there is the three-pin portable charger, adjustable from 8A to 13A and drawing up to 2.8 kW within the limits of what the circuit can sustain. That is around 9 km of range an hour, or something like 110 km from an overnight stop at a cottage or a hotel with an accessible socket. On a long journey through thin infrastructure, that is the difference between reaching the next rapid charger comfortably and planning your day around it. A built-in thermal sensor watches the temperature at the plug and eases the current back automatically if the socket runs warm, which matters more than usual when you are drawing for twelve hours from wiring you have never seen.

One standard, cable after cable

Every Voldt® cable is CE, UKCA and TÜV certified and made to automotive industry quality standards. The connectors are single-piece moulded units with no glue and no mechanical fasteners, housed in IP67-rated bodies tested from −30°C to +50°C. Conductors are 100% copper with silver-plated contacts, and every cable is rated beyond 10,000 connection cycles. Three-year warranty, 100-day returns, free shipping across Europe.