2027 Mercedes-Benz CLA350 4Matic First Test: This Is the Future of Mercedes

Pros

• Road-trips nearly as well as a gas car
• Supremely comfortable seats
• Solid in-car tech

Cons

• Suspension gets flustered by rough roads
• Hypersensitive accelerator pedal
• Mind-boggling on-off logic

The original CLA-Class was a black sheep in the Mercedes family from the moment it was introduced in 2013. Too small and too plasticky with a stiff ride and a four-cylinder engine, it was widely criticized as unworthy of the three-pointed star badge. A second generation launched in 2019 made strides to address those shortcomings, but by then the CLA’s first impression had solidified into a reputation. By shrinking the size and price of its entry car, Mercedes had shrunk the idea of what its cars can and should be.

It’s time to push those old notions of what the CLA is out of your mind, though, because the 2027 Mercedes-Benz CLA350 4Matic is something different entirely. Reborn as an EV on the new Mercedes-Benz Modular Architecture (MMA), the CLA-Class introduces a powertrain concept, infotainment system, and coming soon, a hands-free point-to-point driving assistant that aims to rival Tesla’s Full Self-Driving-all of which are poised to work their way across the lineup. The family pariah has evolved into the technological pioneer leading Mercedes into the future.

Game-Changing Range and Charging

That future looks bright for both the brand and CLA350 buyers due in part to real-world range and charging speeds that allow this EV to road-trip like a gas car. In MotorTrend’s Road-Trip Range test, the CLA350 stretched its 312-mile EPA rating to 368 miles at a steady 70 mph using just 95 percent of a full charge. That wasn’t entirely unexpected, as Mercedes EVs have routinely topped their official ranges in our testing, but the CLA’s 18 percent margin sets a new highwater mark in our records.

Plugged into a BP Pulse 400-kW fast charger, the CLA replenished 198 miles of driving range in just 15 minutes. Pause for a quick meal, and the car can pile on 322 miles in 30 minutes of charging. Think about that. If you leave home with a full battery, you can drive for nearly 10 hours at 70 mph with a single half-hour charging stop. That’s a level of masochism that has largely been unavailable to EV drivers until now.

The CLA-Class has everything working in its favor to make these range and charging numbers possible. It’s the first Merc to use an 800-volt electrical architecture, and it can suck down electricity at up to 320 kW. A small frontal area and windswept profile help it slip through the air, and the rear motor runs through a two-speed transmission that improves its efficiency at highway speeds. If a gas car used as little energy as the CLA350, it would cover a mile on less than a shot glass’ worth of fuel. (A 30-mpg car drinks roughly half a cup of gas to cover the same distance.)

Riding the Powertrain’s Coattails

The CLA350’s smooth, silent, and torquey electric motors are a major upgrade over the outgoing car’s four-cylinder engine and slightly clumsy dual-clutch transmission. Their combined 349 horsepower is good for a brisk 4.2-second 0–60-mph run, where the last gas CLA250 4Matic we tested ran it 1.5 ticks slower. Steering-wheel-mounted paddle shifters let you easily toggle between one-pedal driving, coasting with almost no drag, and an in-between setting where the car decelerates like a gas vehicle.

As smooth as it is, the accelerator is quite sensitive to small movements when one-pedal driving is active. Some drivers complained that big bumps jostled their right foot enough to cause the car to momentarily jump forward or abruptly decelerate. With the pedal pinned to the floor, you’ll also feel the shift into second gear as a momentary interruption in power at around 65 mph, a strange sensation in an EV.

If you were hoping this entry Mercedes would ride like an S-Class, an E-Class, or even a C-Class, you’ll need to reset your expectations. While the ride quality is generally comfortable, when the suspension gets busy the CLA can’t cushion impacts or control its body motions with the premium feel of most Mercs. After the initial compression of a big hit, it often rebounds with springy, underdamped movements.

The steering has a nice heft to it, but that’s pretty much the extent of the CLA350’s sporting ambitions. It weighs nearly 700 pounds more than the Tesla Model 3 that measures the same 185.9 inches long, and the optional 19-inch Michelin e-Primacy 2 summer tires are optimized for range rather than grip. We measured a 110-foot stop from 60 mph and 0.87 g of cornering force at the test track, figures plenty of sedans can replicate on good all-season tires.

It’s a superb commuter and daily driver thanks to the wonderfully sculpted front seats, tidy dimensions, and penny-pinching energy usage. As was the case with the old CLA, the back seat is best reserved for short trips, no matter how small your passengers are. Legroom remains tight, and the jaunty roofline still cuts into the headroom for anyone whose head pokes above the headrests.

A High-Tech Cockpit With a Few Annoying Lows

The dashboard, the traditional pedestal for putting Mercedes craftsmanship on full display, is a wall of hard, shiny plastic. This isn’t the typical cheap stuff, though. The CLA350’s standard 38-inch MBUX Superscreen combines the instrument cluster, center infotainment screen, and passenger display into a single, seamless slab stretching across the car. The brilliant clarity of the high-res screens is striking, but at the same time we hate that the giant display stripped the interior designers of a canvas for showing off their considerable talents. (At least they’re still lavishing their attention on creating the auto industry’s most ornate climate vents.)

The flip side is that the new MB.OS infotainment system behind the screens is excellent. The icons are large, the organization logical, and the navigation map strikes the right balance of detail and clarity. The “zero-layer” home screen that carries over from past Mercedes models adds audio and phone widgets over a map or digital wallpaper, giving you access to key controls without diving into secondary screens. You can install popular streaming apps such as Spotify directly to the car or run them from Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. The AI-powered voice assistant works better than average if you keep the discussion high level. Ask it to do something it can’t, though, and it rudely just ends the conversation with a digital beep rather than admit its own shortcomings.

Unfortunately, the overall experience of living with the CLA350 is tainted by a few fumbled user-interface decisions, including the worst trend in the auto industry-giving the driver two switches to control four windows. Why a $67,580 car only has single-zone climate control is tough to justify, and we were even more mystified to discover there’s no manual control of the climate fan. The HVAC screen gives you the illusion of fan-speed settings, but you’re really choosing the maximum fan speed for the always-on automatic mode. If the climate system drops below your desired minimum speed, however, you’ll have to trick it into doing what you want by fiddling with the temperature and max fan speed settings.

Even more aggravating, the CLA does a bad imitation of Tesla’s just-get-in-and-drive schtick. The Mercedes boots up slowly and only delivers full power after you shift into drive or reverse, which goes against more than a century of behavioral conditioning that trained drivers to start the vehicle before attempting to drive it. Want to put the windows down to vent a hot car before you load your kids in the back? You’ll have to shift to drive first. Oh, and when you shift back to park, the car will probably shut off, killing the air conditioning. We also struggled to get the CLA into the desired power state at a fast charger since the car won’t shift into drive or reverse when plugged in. The logic is inscrutable and infuriating.

For now, the CLA’s maximal driver assist is a $1,950 option that adds lane centering, assisted lane changes, and the ability to stop at red lights and stop signs to the standard adaptive cruise control. It all works well enough but doesn’t move anything forward for either Mercedes or the industry. Mercedes promises that will change when it releases its Tesla-rivaling MB.Drive Assist Pro by the end of this year with the ability to drive point to point, albeit with a driver lightly touching the wheel. We remain cautiously optimistic after being wowed from the passenger seat of a demo drive through San Francisco, but we’re also tempering our expectations as Mercedes has a history of hyping driver assistance tech and then dragging its feet on the rollout.

The Best Is (Hopefully) Yet to Come

It’s always been hard to find the value proposition in the CLA, where cost-control measures are more obvious than in other Mercedes models. This new one makes strides on that front, feeling much more upscale than the CLAs that came before it thanks to its tech-forward cabin and excellent EV powertrain. The bigger problem for Mercedes is that Americans almost universally expect small cars to be cheap cars, and at almost $70,000 as tested, our CLA350 is not a cheap car even by luxury-segment standards. (There is a cheaper, hybrid-powered CLA coming.)

As likable as the 2027 Mercedes-Benz CLA350 4Matic is, the more exciting story here is what it means for the rest of the lineup. The excellent range, blistering fast charging, and intuitive infotainment should translate quite well to larger Mercedes vehicles, where we expect to find better ride quality and premium finishes to help justify premium pricing.