Mercedes-Benz CLA - long-term report

I want to talk about massages.

Being an awkward British man by birth, massages are the opposite of my comfort zone. What should be the epitome of a relaxing experience is actually fraught with stress and anxiety.

It’s not just the blaring alarm inside my brain shrieking “A STRANGER IS TOUCHING YOU". What if they’re thinking ‘crikey, someone enjoyed Christmas last year’? What if there’s a grotesque mole or amusing birthmark between my shoulder blades no-one’s ever told me about?

Should I remain silent throughout, concentrating intensely on the panpipes and whalesong? Is it rude not to groan with satisfaction as the pressure works out my knots and aches? Maybe it’s like burping – a hearty compliment to the chef in some cultures, but a hideous faux pas if you’re dining with royalty.

There’s ever-present danger I overcompensate and appear to be enjoying it too much. It could uncork catastrophic flatulence. Or perhaps I suddenly come over all ticklish and lash out reflexively, karate-chopping the unsuspecting masseuse across the windpipe.

Last time I had a massage I spent most of it apologising, and remained so tense for the duration I left with three new muscle strains and a ripe hernia. Which is why I prefer to enjoy my massages sitting bolt upright, while listening to the football, in the middle of the A43 near Corby.

Yes, as I spend most of my waking hours driving cars, a massaging seat is one of life’s most precious blessings. And as new cars get more homogenised – more platform sharing, more identi-screens, more characterless electric propulsion – massage seats are, let me tell you from years of experience and testing, one of the defining differentiators of the car industry.

Peugeot’s are absolute rubbish. So is Mini’s attempt. They lazily inflate and delate the lumbar support balloon in the backrest. Imagine sitting on a portly man who’s breathing heavily.

The mainstream VW Group does the same thing but better – weirdly Skoda’s offering works fairly convincingly. And in some models you still get an activate-massage button on the seat itself, so no need to risk life and limb prodding a touchscreen.

I maintain enormous respect for what Mercedes-Benz achieved with the previous-gen S-Class, which not only contained a shoal of tame pufferfish in the seat, but introduced pockets of localised heating to create a ‘hot stone’ massage sensation.

The effect it had, corroborated by several ashen-faced colleagues, was a supremely successful laxative. Mercedes perfected the biologically optimal combination of intense heat and persistent kneading to open your body’s bomb bay doors and empty the tank.

My single favourite massage provider remains Bentley – it’s almost invasively thorough. But if I may nitpick Crewe, your treatment programmes don’t last long enough. Please don’t wind back the intensity unless prompted. Or the seat detects I had a curry for dinner. Can seats do that? Best not give them ideas.

So where does the entry-level Mercedes saloon rank? Well, that depends. Because while all AMG-line CLAs have massage seats, none of them will rub-a-dub as standard.

That’s because Mercedes is using massage seats to wade into the murky ethics of subscription-based features. To save time and money in the factory, every CLA with these comfortable (if slightly narrow) chairs has a massage function. But as delivered, there’s no option to activate it in the touchscreen.

Instead, you must first journey to the ‘Digital Extras’ section of the CLA’s comprehensive phone app. There you’ll be presented with various offers to unlock equipment you’re carrying around, but must pay extra to use.

To enable the massage function, you’ll cough up a non-unreasonable £1.60 per month. Or to avoid yet another subscription drip-feed on your account, pay £16 for a 12-month activation. Use it once a day and each massage costs 0.04p.

If you’re feeling incredibly altruistic towards whoever will buy your CLA after you’ve finished with it (or you plan to keep the car until you die and bequeath it to your grandchildren) a one-off permanent activation will set you back £49.

Now, if massage seats were on the options list and I mentioned they were a £49 box we hadn’t ticked, you’d think we’d been cheap. £49 is less than a full recharge at one of Britain’s rip-off motorway service stations.

But I suspect we’re still not ready to accept cars being built with equipment that lies dormant unless we pay extra to unblock it.

When VW announced ID.3 buyers wouldn’t receive the motor’s peak horsepower unless they coughed up a few more quid a month, or BMW tried to hide heated seats behind a paywall (reasoning you only use them in winter and would save money over the lifetime of the car), both were crucified in the court of petrolhead opinion.

So, allow me to save you £1.60. I signed up for the CLA’s massage seats. And they’re… okay. Only two cushions in the lower half of the backrest get to work. No shoulder rubs. No under-thigh squeezes. It lasts about ten minutes, and the on-switch is hidden in an especially tricky-to-access touchscreen sub-menu. So it’s pleasant, but inessential.

Sorry if that’s not the happy ending you were hoping for.