BARCELONA — When the Mercedes-BenzCLS-Class
first arrived in 2004, it was the beginning of the so-called "four-door
coupe" movement. Even if the terminology still rubs people the wrong
way, the style itself has taken off and even influenced SUVs. But as the
genre evolves, Mercedes
has always kept its CLS true to the original. Now in its third
generation, the 2019 CLS retains much of the look of its predecessors,
perhaps because to change it too much would ruin it.
Though it might not look like it from the outside, there are a lot of
tweaks that move the new CLS into the future, particularly under the
hood. As we prepared to get behind the wheel for the first time, Peter
Kolb, the man in charge of vehicle testing for the CLS, told us, "We
have perfected the original." We headed to the scenic mountains of the
Catalonian countryside to see for ourselves.
The main thrust of the styling changes was to remove distracting visuals
for a cleaner overall look. The profile still bears a swoopy silhouette
with a long nose and tiny bubble of a greenhouse behind it, but the
sheet metal is smoother and rounder, with no major sharp creases to
focus in on. CLS designer Uwe Haller described it as Design Philosophy
2.5, which he explained like this: "Leave a line off. If it looks good,
leave another line off." This thinking works for us, as we find the new
CLS's profile to be a near-perfect distillation of the four-door coupe
concept.
Up front, we love the way the hood is completely separated from the
lighting, surrounded on all sides by body. The "shark nose" comes to an
aggressive point in front of the vehicle, and the slim headlights look
clean and fast on their own. The grille, with its diamond design, and
the functional aero bits up along the bottom and at the sides, add some
visual interest. This car has a drag coefficient of 0.29, and it looks
every bit that slippery.
In the rear, the flat deck flips up into a tidy little spoiler, which
helps provide downforce and stability at higher speeds. The new
two-piece taillights are bisected by the opening of the trunk, and they
look sporty and angular — an appropriate visual finale as the car slinks
past you. Depending on the version of the CLS, either one or two
exhaust tips on either side are separated by a rear diffuser.
The car's interior feels like a significant update. Gone is the devotion
to stodgy, conservative styling of eras past. The CLS adopts the
interior treatment pioneered by the 2017 E-Class,
which embraced the latest technology. The new CLS's interior finally
feels just as sexy and charismatic as the focused exterior.
Inside, the wave line, highlighted by mood lighting, draws your eye from
one door, down the dash and across the other door — and even across the
rear doors if you crane your neck. In front of the driver, the CLS is
updated with a pair of digital screens under a single, continuous pane
of glass, an elegant incorporation compared with the previous monolithic
look of the central tablet. One serves as the instrument panel, the
other as an infotainment display. The leather stretched across the dash
and over the seats of our tester's Designo interior is smooth and soft.
Perhaps the most interesting visual feature inside the CLS, though, is
the jet-turbine look of the round, illuminated air vents. Lighting
around the knob in the center changes from blue when blowing cool air to
red when providing heat.
Apart from the lack of overhead airspace, the interior of the CLS feels
particularly roomy. There's a lot of space between the front occupants,
and it's wide enough for a middle seat in the back — a first for the
CLS. That low-slung roofline does mean you taller folks will have to
take off your cowboy hat before you get in. At 6 feet tall, moving our
seat as low as it would go did allow us to forget about the headroom
issues after a bit.
The most intriguing change to the CLS isn't an aesthetic one. Instead,
it's under the hood, in the form of an inline six-cylinder engine with a
48-volt hybrid
system. By practice, we'd call this a "mild" hybrid system, but that
descriptor just doesn't do justice to how important a role it plays in
both the CLS450 and the AMG 53.
In practice, the inline-six in the CLS450 is truly a pleasure to use.
For one thing, it sounds interesting. The little bit of noise that makes
its way in from under the hood is very mechanical and controlled; it's
really easy to picture the tiny, perfectly timed individual explosions
ticking off in their respective cylinders. There's a comforting
smoothness in that configuration in terms of putting power down, first
familiar to your author from a 1999 Jeep Cherokee's
4.0-liter inline-six but with a pedigree in Mercedes vehicles
stretching back to the 1920s. An odd mental comparison, perhaps, but it
demonstrates what this engine represents to us: a workhorse.
If you want to take a deeper dive into the CLS engine's technical details, there's more to read. Mercedes's new inline-six really is an interesting motor in terms of technology, safety, efficiency, cooling and NVH.
The inclusion of the 48-volt EQ Boost system, with its additional 22
horsepower and 184 pound-feet of torque (yes, you read that correctly),
is part of what makes this powertrain so satisfying to use. Normally,
mild hybrid systems feel passive, unnoticed by the driver except when
the engine shudders to life when a stoplight turns green. Uniquely,
Mercedes showcases this system to the driver with a single, linear gauge
on the instrument panel, with the meter moving to the left during
charging, and right during boosting. This allows the driver to
correspond the acceleration they feel to what the system is actually
doing. It feels playful, and introduces into this gas-powered sports car a little bit of the joy experienced by EV drivers. Baby steps.
The rest of the driving dynamics are familiar. The nine-speed automatic
transmission shifts smoothly, quickly and quietly in the 450. The
steering is typically uncommunicative, but we didn't find any difficulty
in aiming the slinky CLS along the narrow mountain roads of Catalonia,
though some of the bus drivers near Monestir de Montserrat seemed to
have even more confidence than us. Even in the rain, putting our foot to
the floor in our AWD test car was met with faultless stability.
In the AMG CLS53, everything is more amplified. Output is boosted to 429
horsepower and 384 pound-feet with the help of a twin-scroll
turbocharger electric auxiliary compressor. It also benefits from the
same temporary power bump from the EQ Boost starter-alternator. From the
driver's seat, the sound of this turbocharged version is more dominated
by the exhaust. The shifts from the AMG-tuned nine-speed transmission
are met with blats from the four exhaust tips in the rear. The
0-to-60-mph run comes in a snappy 4.5 seconds, three-tenths of a tick
faster than in the 450 4Matic. The steering feels tighter, more
responsive and even a bit more communicative about the road surface. We
were able, on just a couple occasions, to elicit just a wee bit of
squirreliness from the rear end when accelerating out of a tight, wet
corner.
Mercedes-Benz has been a leader when it comes to intelligent driver
assistance systems, and now cruise control is getting even smarter. The
CLS borrows its Distronic technology from the S-Class.
It has adaptive cruise control and lane following. The neat trick here,
though, is that it will automatically adjust for changing speed limits,
and it even anticipates curves in the road and slows down for them. On
the windy Spanish highways, we were truly impressed to see the car
navigate corners on its own. It did so cautiously, and at lower
cornering speeds than we'd have maintained under manual control. No
surprises there, as safety and comfort come first.
So, is this the perfect CLS? Let's go down the list.
Exterior design? Nailed it.
Interior? The space, materials and overall design go in the win column.
It's the appearance of the techy stuff that stands to age less
gracefully. We'll call it mission accomplished for now, though we'll be
interested to take another look at the third-generation CLS close to the
end of its life cycle to see whether we still dig those screens and
illuminated vents.
Technology? Spot on. The driver assistance tech, in particular, is nice to have in a grand tourer like this.
Powertrain? Nailed it. We loved both iterations of this inline-six and
hope to see it in more vehicles soon. The EQ Boost system takes an
already solid format and makes it feel advanced. Routing power through a
smooth, no-fuss nine-speed automatic with paddle shifter seems like the
ideal, well-rounded choice for the CLS.
Driving dynamics? It does a good job of being a CLS. It's not a car you
take to the track and beat to hell. It's a car for eating up miles
quickly, comfortably, not to mention stylishly. As such, yeah, Mercedes
nailed it.
The third-generation might be damn close to the being the perfect CLS.
There's only one thing in the near term that could change that: the Mercedes-Benz GT 4-Door Coupe. We'll find out soon enough.
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