Mercedes CLA EV marks the beginning of a new era of electric Mercedes design. EQ cars and their various compromises quickly disappeared, replaced by modern, 800 volt, software-defined EVs like the CLA250+ with EQ technology that arrived at my door for testing, but the experience felt like all of my recent Mercedes tests. I started to be pleasantly surprised by the driving dynamics and the luxurious seats, but got increasingly excited by many of the design decisions. CLA is nice to drive. Even if the curb weight of 4,530 pounds never falls to featherweight, it feels light and athletic in a way that some EVs can match. With its well-dialed body movement and fun acceleration sound, it's all better by the awesome Barmester stereo (standalone880 standalone option).
Indeed, the CLA250+ is at the slow end of the EV market. It gets only 268 horsepower, sent exclusively to the rear wheels. The car's 2-speed gearbox is weird for EVs, but that means the moderately powered CLA doesn't run out of steam as you go faster.In addition, when you're on a hard drive, you can feel about 65-1 shifts at 2mph. Since a full 247-pound-foot of torque is available from scratch, you can still make your passengers uncomfy with off-the-line rips. If you need to have more speed, with its 349 hp all-wheel drive powertrain, opt for the CLA350.. The company eventually replaced the capacitive volume slider on the steering wheel with a tactile knob.
But for some reason, with the CLA EV, this comes with a strange trade-off: you can't skip a track from the handle. For example, if you have a physical skip button on the central stack, this can be a small problem. CLA peaked at 400kW when connected to a 100-volt charger, where almost all Tesla superchargers are. So expect more time at 1 of these stations. Oddly enough, the CLA also features another J1772 slow charging port. So instead of performing both slow and fast charging through the same NACS port, like competitors, you should use the J1772 port for AC charging and the NACS port for fast charging. This strikes me as the worst of both worlds, but that's because the justification is that owners of existing Mercedes EVs do not need to get a new home charger.
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Due to the swooping roofline and small doors, the rear windows of the CLA rarely go down. When combined with a fixed glass roof, this is a fairly poor open-air car. Finally, the pillar-less design of the door looks great, but there were problems with the rear windows being properly sealed several times. I would ride on the highway and hear the wind whistling, so I dropped the windows and had to raise them again to get a proper seal. This is especially annoying if you don't have a dedicated switch for the problematic window, but I'm overemphasizing my point here. You can also do quite some unrelated things on the MBUX-powered central screen, such as playing mobile games, taking selfies, or joining Microsoft Teams calls.
I took one team call from the CLA, and I didn't like the camera angle that showed the whole car and the skylight, but I would say the experience of taking a work call sitting at sea in a comfortable Mercedes seat was good. I would also give a shout out to the customizability of the Burmester stereo. You can control every aspect of your sound system, from normal tuning settings to 3D surround effects. You can even adjust the sound depending on how seat it is occupied automatically. But my favorite control was the base style. Most cars allow you to control how the bass is dominant in the overall mix, but CLA also allows you to control how the bass is dominant in the overall mix, which I hate when the bass punchy or soft ultra punchy bass dominate the song, but I don't want to tune the low end completely so I find this to be a great option.
Mercedes' new voice assistant is a major part of CLA with the ability to pull information from BING and Google Gemini. But for me it was not. I asked for a restaurant near my destination and showed me a restaurant near my current location. You can do basic things like raising the temperature of the car, but without AI it was possible. It could not change the driving mode of the car. And it couldn't do what I really liked, it was to "roll down all the windows". It said local regulations prevent it. The company's hands-on lane centering system with adaptive cruise control was the same as General Motors' Hands-off Super Cruise system, which I even knew would slow down when I was coming to the point where the two lanes merged. The company says it will introduce a hands-on point-to-point driver assistant, MB. Drive Assist Pro. Much like Tesla's fully autonomous (with surveillance), the system leverages Nvidia's DRIVE AV software to navigate intersections and traffic lights under the driver's supervision.
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If you were stuck in traffic on certain highways in California and Nevada, you could legally watch a movie on the car's built-in screen and take your eyes and attention off the road. But it is now gone, and the Drive Assist Pro is here to pick up where it was interrupted, but always with you legally in control. Every time I started CLA, it gave me an error that the driver assistance system was not available. I don't know why this happened all I can tell you is that when I parked up the hill like the one outside my house, it's occasionally, it was worse than a simple alert, too, with a bunch of yellow warnings about individual systems not working. All of these warnings were cleared, usually within 2 minutes, but sometimes nearly 5 minutes.
But this is a common experience I had with a Mercedes test car and one that I feel uneasy about. They seem to be very quick to throw warning lights at you, but they suggest there was no real problem, just to clear themselves up later, which makes it feel like these new luxury cars are always on the verge of disaster. CLA was also very keen to tell me not to forget my phone when it was in the wireless charging tray, or, more often, when I opened the door it was annoying enough to get annoying advice from the car but after I had already taken my phone it caused a delay that would remind me to take my phone. The logic was frustrating. I'm sure you can turn it off, but I hope there were a few nag and prompts that I had to turn off in every Mercedes these days.
The CLA has always been the smallest and cheapest Mercedes sedan in the United States. That means it's not cheap to make a proper luxury car, so it always feels a bit watered down. But still, I felt a little fleece sitting in a $64,780 car with bright, cheap plastic running through the entire center console. It was also the only real decoration; the rest of the interior is dominated by a huge super screen. I rarely had passengers, and most of the time because about a third of the dash was taken up by screensavers, when I didn't bother much to use the screen where everyone is facing passengers. Of course, it's a matter of taste. MBUX's graphic design looks mostly premium and the system is certainly snappy.
But when combined with a gauge cluster, which is far less customizable than other recent Mercedes models, it has more screens than information to display. All of this makes CLA a vision for the future, better or worse. It's a modern software-defined vehicle that plans to add real features in the air, but it's also a medium core user experience, although there are plenty of neat software gadgets that you use the hardware the car already has. This is why I am struggling with many modern Mercedes models. I have always loved Mercedes because I love quiet and competent luxury. The W211E class is the pinnacle of automotive capabilities for me. It is neither flashy nor luxurious nor absurd.
That is not the mission of Mercedes today. The company pivoted to a vision of luxury technology-defined, flashy, light-up badges by adding. For many, that's exactly what they want. They will probably be happy with CLA. It rides very well, has all the range you need and charges like a champion. It has all the features you can ask for, and a lot more on. But I want to feel like the Mercedes was built with complete sophistication in every aspect, respected in every environment and relentlessly focused on the little things.
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