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Mercedes is about to bring an all-electric CLA-Class sedan to the market and we have all of the important details.
Mercedes Unveils its CLA-Class EV
The automotive world is slowly but surely becoming electric. Cadillac, Audi, and others are making the shift as quickly as they can. Mercedes-Benz is taking the shift toward electrification quite seriously. It’s already released the EQS and the EQS SUV and even the EQB and EQE.
Now, it’s unwrapped another EV, a CLA-Class concept and it’s saying that it’s close to production. Perhaps the most interesting facet of this new car is its exterior design which begins a slight shift away from that of the EQS and EQE. Here’s a breakdown of how it’ll do that and what it’ll come with when it launches sometime in the next year.
CLA EV Exterior Design
Mercedes’ first EV sedan, the EQS, arrived with a very bold if not somewhat simple shape. The EQE mid-sized electric sedan that followed received an almost identical exterior design. The CLA-Class EV concept strikes out on its own. Sure, it’s still round and slippery, a necessity for it to achieve its excellent range, but it’s a bit more aggressive-looking. Don’t get us wrong, the look of this concept isn’t going to be exactly what ends up at your local Mercedes dealer but it offers a lot to hope for.
The upswept vestigial grille section that blends into the headlights on the EQE and EQS is now flipped over and widens toward the road. The headlights are their own unique piece of the front end and, at least in the concept, get tri-star LED daytime running lights.
The hood looks like it could’ve come right off of an SL-Class convertible and blends into a sleek and high belt line to the rear decklid. There, the tail features two more tri-star LED lights and a slick end-encompassing lightbar. It’s a tight well-executed package with a lot of panache.
Futuristic Interior Features
The cabin might be even bolder though we’re very confident that it’ll see more cuts to the production version than the exterior cues do. First, the CLA-Class concept has only a single piece of metal above its passengers. It sits at the top of the windshield where a gigantic glass panel stretches from there to the trunk lid.
It’s speckled with tri-star Mercedes logos too. It’s a four-seater exclusively too with a single-piece captain’s chair in each corner of the cabin. The dash shows off the MBUX Superscreen we’ve seen in a few other models already. That will almost certainly be a part of the final car. We fully expect it to be available with Mercedes’ recently-approved Level 3 autonomous driving software.
Performance Goals
Mercedes isn’t letting on too much about the CLA-Class concept but it does say that it’s aiming for about 400 miles of range and that it’ll leverage an 800-volt architecture. That should make it less necessary to charge at home as public fast chargers will be capable of juicing the CLA up quite quickly. While we don’t know what kind of performance it’ll offer we expect it to make at least 280 horsepower and feature a battery capacity of about 90 kWh.
Mercedes-Benz Production Expectations
While Mercedes-Benz hasn’t said exactly when the CLA-Class EV will go into production, we do have a window of “late 2024” to look forward to. That gives the German automaker about a year to finish firming up the details of the final production car. We fully expect it to come to market late next year or even the following first quarter as a 2025 model.
