Mercedes-Benz CLA Shooting Brake review

The CLA can come with a Superscreen that consists of an entire dash of three visually linked screens: a 10.25-inch driver’s display, a 14-inch 2,504x1,260px central touchscreen and another 14-inch passenger screen from which passengers can dull their frontal cortex with YouTube shorts.

Except the passenger screen is optional, and if you don’t pay, you just get a big slab of black plastic speckled with star emblems. It’s not the most aesthetic of solutions…

But before you decry the touchscreen dominance, there’s another way to communicate with the CLA that works better than most; you just talk to it. Merc’s new Virtual Assistant is infused with artificial intelligence from Microsoft and Google, can sense your mood (and act accordingly, though we didn't see how) and even has a short-term memory.

What that means is that you can ask/tell the system pretty complicated things and it (generally) works them out. So you can instruct the air con, radio, sat nav, phone in routine ways, but also ask it to find you a Thai restaurant that serves a particular dish, or a pub that serves Sunday roast that also allows dogs.

Which is fine until it doesn't. We all know from dictating text to a phone that these things will sometimes just stubbornly refuse to co-operate. And that's even when you have a connection. Roads often go where the signal bars fizzle away. Plus, most passengers will either interrupt, or laugh at you for talking to a bot.

For display and touch functions the central screen is based on what Mercedes calls zero layer: pretty well everything is available after a single jab at one of the boxes on the homescreen. So that's what we used.

For the driver, the instruments are a well-organised driver's info rectangle, with easily configured layouts and graphic schemes, including a nice classic pair or clear circular dials.

The standard steering wheel has the briefly fashionable capacitive touch buttons. Too easy to accidentally activate. The AMG Line one positions them further away from the heel of your hand so it happens less often.

And what about the actual interior?

The rest of the interior is well-made, with some nice materials. A big, floating centre console with cupholders and wireless charging pad gives you plenty of storage and visual interest.

Parts of the trim are, spec-dependent, brushed aluminium, an anodised look, chequer pattern or and a white decorative paper surface that’s a bit like laminate of natural bamboo. You can have a newly developed seat upholstery with a technical-looking pearl effect in black or white, or even red. Pearl fake leather? It's as 1990s as it sounds.

That Nite Klub vibe is boosted by switching the ambient lighting to purple. Fortunately many, less brash hues are in the screen menu. The air vents are backlit, and very fancy they look too. But they feel cheap. Still, they blow well.

Whether the comparatively ordinary-looking front seats in the Sports version or the AMG-Line tombstone jobs, both are fabulously comfy over a long distance. But things aren't so good in the back. Although the Shooting Brake has, unlike the saloon, decent headroom, leg and foot space is short and the floor is high. This means you sit with your knees high, taking the weight off the thighs and putting it onto your bum. Numbness likely follows.

The boot is 455 litres seats-up. It looks shallow but is long front-to-back. Solid eyelets let you tie loads down, and levers let you drop the rear seat-backs while you stand behind the rear bumper. Plus you have 101 litres under the bonnet.