Mercedes-Benz CLA Electric

Bar-raising EV’s big-range and fast-charging claims are put to the test Ever since the car industry started slowly pivoting towards electric cars, it hasn’t felt like the European manufacturers have really steered the ship. They’ve made plenty of good cars that have appealed on more traditional grounds such as vehicle dynamics and interior quality and ambience, but the big pushes on range and lean manufacturing have come from Tesla, and advances in battery tech from China and South Korea. Meanwhile, solid-state batteries have been the technology of the near future for an awfully long time and hydrogen is turning out to be a dud for use in passenger cars.Now here’s Mercedes-Benz with one of the longest-range electric cars on sale in the UK – and it’s not the brand’s top-dollar technology flagship but the entry-level saloon. The Mercedes-Benz CLA achieves this not with some next-generation battery, but with a combination of the fairly traditional engineering that Mercedes has long been known for – gearboxes and aerodynamics – and the electric motor expertise it has gathered over the past few years of volume EV making. It proved a match for the Tesla Model 3 in a recent group test, even if it couldn’t quite beat it. Now to see how it fares in our range of instrumented tests.