The 2026 Mercedes CLA EV Is Really Impressive. But It Also Drove Me Nuts
It is so lovely to drive. But the more I lived with it, the more annoyed I got.
The Mercedes CLA EV marks the start of a new era in electric Mercedes design. The EQ cars and their various compromises will soon be gone, replaced by modern, 800-volt, software-defined EVs like the CLA 250+ with EQ Technology that arrived at my door for testing.
Yet the experience felt much like all of my recent Mercedes tests. I started off pleasantly surprised by the driving dynamics and plush seats, only to end up increasingly agitated by many of the design decisions. By the time the fleet company came to retrieve it, I was happy to watch it drive away.
WHY LEMONADE?
This story was published in partnership with Lemonade. Lemonade Insurance uses technology to keep things simple and offer lower prices for a wide array of EV drivers. They offer discounts for safe and low mileage driving, and further discounts for drivers of EVs and PHEVs. If you have a Tesla with FSD, you can even get discounts for the miles driven on FSD. Click here to get a quote for your EV today.
*Lemonade and the FSD discount are available in select states, learn more at the link above.
The CLA is a sophisticated and impressive machine. But it feels like Mercedes spent more time cramming gadgets into the car than refining the core experience, all the while charging you extra for the software-enabled features this car is built for.
(Full Disclosure: Mercedes loaned me a fully charged CLA 250+ with EQ Technology for a week for this test.)
Gallery: 2026 Mercedes CLA 250 w/EQ Technology: Review
PRO: Excellent driving experience
Here’s where I agree with my coworker Andrei Nedelea, who drove the car on his home turf in Romania: The CLA is lovely to drive. It feels light and athletic in a way that few EVs can match, even if the 4,530-pound curb weight by no means lands it in the featherweight class. It may be hundreds of pounds heavier than a Model 3, but its eager turn-in and lithe dynamics make it an absolute delight on a twisty backroad.
No, it’s no sports car, but it’s a helluva stand-in for a grand tourer. With its well-dialed body motions and fun acceleration sounds, it’s a great car for whisking through a beautiful landscape, made all the better by a fantastic Burmester stereo (an $880 standalone option).
To be sure, the CLA 250+ is on the slow end of the EV market. It gets just 268 horsepower sent exclusively to the rear wheels. The car’s two-speed gearbox is strange for an EV, but it means the modestly powered CLA doesn’t run out of steam as you go faster. Plus, you can feel the 1-2 shift at around 65 mph when you’re driving hard. Still, with a 0-60 time of 6.6 seconds, it’s slower than my porky-ass Chevy Blazer EV.
I don’t care. I think it’s a complete mistake to conflate power with fun, and the CLA’s tame power output means you can spend more time wringing it out on a backroad. Plus, it’s hardly slow. Because the full 247 pound-feet of torque is available from a start, you can still make your passengers uncomfy with an off-the-line rip. If you must have more speed, opt for the CLA 350, with its 349-hp all-wheel-drive powertrain.
2026 Mercedes CLA 250 w/EQ Tech Specs
CON: No skip button on the steering wheel
Sometimes I wonder if Mercedes’ modern motto is two steps forward, one step back. The company has finally replaced the capacitive volume slider on the steering wheel with a tactile knob. But for some reason, in the CLA EV, this comes with a bizarre trade-off: You can’t skip a track from the steering wheel.
This would be a minor issue if there was, say, a physical skip button in the center stack. But there isn’t. The only ways to skip a track are by using the small button in the central touch screen or by using voice commands. If you have another app open in the touch screen, like your Apple CarPlay’s Google Maps screen, or one of the million settings, you have to use a voice command.
Skipping a track using the steering wheel is something Mercedes figured out in 1998. Nearly three decades later, this has become a forgotten art. Worse still, you can’t even see what track is playing in the gauge cluster. Despite it being a fully digital display that can do a full-screen map or driver-assistance view, it cannot display the song that you’re listening to.
I'm glad there's a physical volume scroller, but I wish you could skip tracks and show music info using the steering wheel.
These are small problems that can hopefully be remedied with a software update. But I find them indicative of a larger approach: The company is so focused on coming up with new features that it often compromises the basic things you use every day.
PRO: Range and charging
The CLA is a range monster. In 250+ guise, it can get up to 374 miles of EPA range. But opt for 19” wheels and it drops to 317 miles. Either figure is enough, especially as there’s some evidence that the range estimate may be conservative, but the difference is quite big. AWD CLA 350s top out at 312 miles of range.
The 800-volt architecture also improves charging times. Mercedes says the CLA 250+ can go from 10-80% in as little as 22 minutes with a peak charging power of 320 kW. But like with many NACS-equipped modern EVs, you may need an adapter to hit your ideal numbers. The CLA peaks at 100 kW when hooked up to a 400-volt charger, which almost all Tesla Superchargers are. So expect it to take a lot longer at one of those stations.
Weirdly, the CLA also features a separate J1772 slow-charging port. So instead of running both slow and fast charging through the same NACS port, as rivals do, you have to use the J1772 port for any AC charging and the NACS port for fast charging. This strikes me as the worst of both worlds, but the justification seems to be that existing Mercedes EV owners won’t need to get new home chargers. So be it.
CON: Everything about the windows
I am a windows-down person. I spend quite a bit of my money to live in a city where I can enjoy fresh air year round, and as a work-from-home car enthusiast, much of my driving involves pleasure cruising along the oceanside cliffs. That means many of my drives start with all four windows down and progress into windows-up highway drives.
And boy, does the CLA stink at that. First off, it has the worst window switch setup in the car industry. It replaces the typical four driver-controlled switches with two, plus a “rear” toggle below. So to drop all four windows, you have to put the front two down, hit “rear,” and then put the others down. It’s the same smooth-brained approach that started in the Volkswagen ID.4 and has since spread like a particularly nasty STI. It was annoying in a $40,000 Volkswagen, but it’s unacceptable in a $64,780 (as-tested) Mercedes.
Also annoying for a sixty-grand Benz: the rear windows do not have auto-up functionality. So you can’t flick them up then quickly switch to the fronts, you have to hold them instead. The good news is this does not take long. Because of the swooping roofline and small doors, the CLA’s rear windows barely go down. Combined with a fixed-glass roof, this is quite a poor open-air car.
Finally, the pillar-less design of the doors looks great, but I did have an issue with the rear windows properly sealing a few times. I’d get on the highway and hear wind whistling in, so I had to drop the windows and raise them again to get a proper seal. This is especially annoying when you do not have a dedicated switch for the offending window, but I’m over-stressing my own point here.
Pro: Fun gimmicks
I may believe that Mercedes overemphasizes bling these days and underemphasizes the basics. But man, some of the bling is certainly fun. The CLA gets a variety of fun powertrain noises, all with their own cool names and design themes. And its wall-to-wall Superscreen gets pretty display themes, each with complementary ambient lighting.
You can also do quite a few extraneous things with the MBUX-powered central screen, like play mobile games, take selfies, or even join Microsoft Teams calls. I took one Teams call from the CLA, and while I didn’t like the camera angle that showed the entire car and skylight, I will say the experience of taking a work call sitting by the ocean in a comfy Mercedes seat was nice.
I’ll also give a shout-out to the customizability of the Burmester stereo. You can control every aspect of the sound system, from the normal tuning settings to the 3D surround effect. You can even have it automatically adjust the sound depending on what seats are occupied. But my favorite control was the bass style. Most cars let you control how dominant the bass is in the overall mix, but the CLA also lets you choose between punchy or softer style of bass. I hate when ultra-punchy bass dominates a song, but I don’t want to tune out the low-end completely, so I found this to be a wonderful option.
Sadly, while the CLA with Burmester audio supports Dolby Atmos, it inexplicably does not support native Apple Music, which was available on the EQE and EQS. I hope that Apple Music comes in an over-the-air update, because if not it’ll feel like another small step back.
CON: AI assistant doesn’t live up to the hype (yet)
Mercedes’ new voice assistant is a major part of the CLA, with the ability to pull in info from Bing and Google Gemini. Former InsideEVs editor-in-chief Patrick George was quite impressed with it. I loved the Gemini integration in the Volvo EX60, especially the conversational navigation feature, which is also supposed to work in the Mercedes.
But for me, it didn’t. I’d ask it for restaurants near my destination, and it’d show me ones near my current location. I’d ask for “fast chargers near public parks” and it’d just show me ones near me. I’d ask for restaurants with vegetarian options and it’d just show me restaurants. I’d ask it trivia, and it would stall out and not answer.
It could do basic things like raising the temperature in the car, but that was possible without AI. It couldn’t change the car’s drive mode. And it couldn’t do what I really would love, which was “roll down all the windows.” It said local regulations prevent that. If I wanted a voice in my car to give me inaccurate excuses and tell me it’s impossible to do basic things, I’d call my health insurance company.
I still think conversational navigation and true whole-car AI systems could be useful. The EX60 proved that to me. But this version would need a few more updates before I’d start using it consistently.
PRO: Great lane-centering
Mercedes pioneered radar-based cruise control in the 1990s and has been offering lane-centering technology for over a decade. From behind the wheel of the CLA, I could certainly tell. The company’s hands-on lane-centering system with adaptive cruise control is about as confident and competent as General Motors’ hands-off Super Cruise system. It even knew to slow down when I was coming up to a point where two lanes merged.
The system in the CLA is supposed to get even better. The company says it’ll introduce a hands-on point-to-point driver assistant, MB. Drive Assist Pro. Roughly equivalent to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised), the system will leverage Nvidia’s DRIVE AV software to navigate intersections and traffic lights under driver supervision. The capability will eventually come via an over-the-air update, Mercedes says. But it’s not here now, and nobody outside of Mercedes has actually driven using the system, so I’m not giving any points for that yet.
Weirdly, this system will replace Mercedes’ old Drive Pilot, which was the only consumer system in the U.S. that was legally self-driving in certain highly restricted scenarios. If you were stuck in traffic on certain highways in California and Nevada, you could legally take your eyes and attention off the road, watching movies on the car’s built-in screen. But that’s gone, now, and Drive Assist Pro is here to pick up where it left off, but with you always legally in control.
CON: Too many error messages
Almost every time I started the CLA, it gave me an error that driver assistance systems were unavailable. I have no idea why this happened—all I can tell you is it seemed to happen more consistently when I parked on a hill, like the one outside my house. Occasionally it was worse than a simple alert, too, with a bunch of yellow warnings about each individual system not working.
All of these warnings cleared themselves, usually within two minutes but occasionally closer to five. But this is a common experience I’ve had with Mercedes test cars, and something I find unsettling. They seem very quick to throw warning lights at you, only for them to clear themselves later, suggesting there was no real problem. It makes it feel like these new luxury cars are always on the brink of disaster.
The CLA was also extremely eager to tell me not to forget my phone when it was in the wireless charging tray, or, more often, when I had picked it up a second before opening the door and triggering the car to shut down. It’s annoying enough to get unsolicited advice from the car, but the delayed logic causing it to remind me to take my phone after I had already taken my phone was frustrating. I’m sure you can turn it off, but I wish there were fewer nags and prompts I had to turn off in every Mercedes these days.
I'll also note that the CLA's back seat is a little tight, with a high floor that pushes your knees up. I'm only 5' 6" and it still wasn't great. I'm not docking too many points for this, tough, as cars in this class rarely have great back seats.
CON: Feels cheap
The CLA has always been the smallest, cheapest Mercedes sedan in the U.S. That means it’s always going to feel a little bit watered down, as it’s not cheap to make a proper luxury car. But still, I did feel a little fleeced sitting in a $64,780 car that had bright, cheap plastic running down the entire center console. That was also the only real ornamentation; the rest of the interior is dominated by the giant superscreen. I rarely had a passenger, and when I did nobody cared much to use the passenger-facing screen, so most of the time roughly one-third of the dash was taken up by a screensaver.
That’s a matter of taste, of course. The graphic design of MBUX does look premium, mostly, and the system is certainly snappy. But combined with the gauge cluster—which is far less customizable than other recent Mercedes models—it just feels like there’s more screen than there is information to show you.
The silver inlay in the center console is not my favorite. And almost everything else is black plastic or a screen.
But you more or less have to get the Superscreen. If you don’t, that space is instead taken up by a big slab of shiny black plastic covered in little Mercedes stars. It looks like the tackiest person you know’s idea of luxury.
Plus, you’ll probably want the $5,850 Pinnacle Trim, which includes the Superscreen. It also includes basics you’d expect from a modern software-defined EV, like a 360-degree camera and digital key support. At the very least, you need the $2,250 Exclusive Trim, lest you find yourself in a $50,000 Mercedes without dual-zone climate control and keyless go.
What’s frustrating about this setup is that many of the options are also “Digital Extras,” Mercedes’ term for software features that you have to pay to access. Some of them are included in the Pinnacle Trim, but some—like AR navigation—come separately as $300 one-time digital purchases. Every CLA has the hardware for 360-degree cameras, augmented reality navigation, and phone-as-a-key support, but you’ll have to pay to unlock them.
Verdict
All of this makes the CLA a vision of the future, for better and worse. It’s a modern software-defined vehicle slated to get real features added over-the-air, but that also means you have to pay to use hardware the car already has. It’s got plenty of neat software gadgets, but a middling core user experience.
This is why I struggle with many modern Mercedes models. I have always loved Mercedes, because I love quiet, competent luxury. A W211 E-Class is, to me, the pinnacle of automotive competency. It is not showy or opulent or absurd; it is just roundly nice, in every moment.
That’s not Mercedes’ mission today. The company has pivoted to a tech-defined, glitzy, light-up badge vision of luxury by addition. For many people, that is exactly what they want. They’d probably be happy in a CLA. It rides very well, has all the range you’d ever need, and charges like a champ. It’s got every feature you could ask for, and plenty more on top. But I want a Mercedes to feel utterly refined in every aspect, respectable in every environment, and like it was built with a relentless focus on the little things. By that bar, the CLA doesn’t measure up.
Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com.
Related Stories
RECOMMENDED FOR YOU
I Drove The 2027 Chevy Bolt. I Loved All The Storage Space But Its Cheap-Feeling Interior Was Underwhelming
Uber, Stellantis, And Wayve Want To Blanket The World In Robotaxis
I Tried The Future Of EV Camping In The Pebble Flow
Tesla Owners Are Using Doll Heads To Fool Full Self-Driving
The 2026 Toyota C-HR Feels Like A Misstep In A Pivotal Year For EVs
Lucid And Uber Will Bring Robotaxis To Houston Next
2027 BMW iX3 Video Review: BMW Is Back