Mercedes-Benz GLC Electric Shadow Line & Larger Wheels To Look Cooler Than iX3

New Mercedes-Benz GLC with EQ Technology with some mods. Which one is better, GLC or the new BMW iX3?. Fully electric with 408 hp and 713 km range.
 

On the eve of the 2025 IAA Mobility Show in Munich, Germany, both Mercedes-Benz and BMW decided to steal the show by premiering – mere hours apart – the second-generation BMW iX3 and the first-ever Mercedes-Benz GLC with EQ Technology.
 
The BMW iX3 is obviously the successor of the rather bland first generation, and it’s coming as the first exponent of a new paradigm of design for the Bavarian automaker, with the Neue Klasse styling on the outside and a completely revamped cockpit experience inside. Meanwhile, the ardent Mercedes-Benz rival needs a bit of explaining.
 
This isn’t an all-new Mercedes-Benz GLC because it doesn’t send into retirement the ICE-powered second-generation Mercedes-Benz GLC (X254 and C254 for the coupe-SUV model) that arrived in the summer of 2022. Instead, it’s the indirect replacement for the 2019-2023 Mercedes EQC, the first member of the all-electric Mercedes EQ family.
Since then, the German company has nuanced the title and now EVs feature the same name as their ICE counterparts, but add ‘with EQ Technology’ to the name. Sure, we can all call the Mercedes-Benz GLC Electric and be done with that – especially since it’s pretty vastly different from the regular GLC and all other Mercedes-Benz models, for that matter.
 
While BMW is slimming down the grille size, Mercedes-Benz has gone the opposite way and the fake one on the GLC Electric could swallow the iX3 – while the cockpit also has a pillar-to-pillar screen treatment that Mercedes’ design boss already calls much better than the one deployed by BMW with a big central screen and a slim one at the base of the windscreen for the instrument cluster.
 

Anyway, it’s clear that folks can’t talk about one without the other – even the members of the imaginative guild of digital car content creators dwelling across the parallel universes of vehicular CGI. For example, Nikita Chuicko, the virtual artist better known as kelsonik on social media, thinks that now is the right CGI time to work on the 2026 Mercedes-Benz GLC with EQ Technology, especially since he also did a CGI design project based on the BMW iX3.
 
While the latter only needed a couple of digital tweaks to become more palatable – the pixel master faded out the illuminated grille and gave it much larger, black concave Y-spoke alloy wheels, there’s more work to be done on the Mercedes-Benz rival. As such, the GLC Electric gets the author’s signature CGI Shadow Line treatment, where all chrome elements fade into dark gray – especially the humongous grille.
 
Additionally, while he kept the OEM look of the alloy wheels, now they’re an order of magnitude larger for better overall proportions. Naturally, the artist compared the CGI result to the real deal and then also put side-by-side the real BMW iX3 and Mercedes-Benz GLC with EQ Technology for a quick comparison on our part. So, which one do you prefer?