Mercedes-Benz CLA - long-term report

With the CLA soon leaving my life forever, I wanted to do something I’ve somehow never attempted: a proper long electric car journey. As in, from the English Midlands to Stuttgart, Germany, in a single day. That’s 1,000km in 12 hours with no hypermiling or air-con prohibition. A three-country motorway schlep. Why Stuttgart? Because Mercedes is celebrating a big birthday in 2026 – more on that soon.

It was almost flawless. Almost as easy as it would’ve been in a combustion car. Some of that wasn’t the blue Benz’s fault – but quite a bit of it was. And if you’re thinking “oh here we go, another two-footed tackle on EVs, range and charging from someone with an agenda”, that’s not me.

I like daily-driving an electric car. I like the peace, the response and the knowledge I’m not micro-gassing pedestrians. Like you I was also alarmed how hot and dry our summer was. I’d like to do my bit to spew fewer greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Things started well – left my house at 6am prompt with a full overnight charge and cruised blissfully down to Folkestone services, the usual final stop before boarding the Eurotunnel train. But the last charge in England was a let-down. Partly because as usual with Ionity motorway chargers, it was more expensive than my student loan. 89p per kWh is a mugging. And partly because despite being the only vehicle at the entire bank of alleged 350kW chargers, the fastest charging speed the Merc pulled even while down at 50 per cent was barely over 100kW.

So that took a little longer than I’d have liked, but I followed the EV-angelist charging gospel. Went for a pee, grabbed a coffee, answered some emails, had a break. No biggie. Armed with a 97 per cent charge I headed for passport control, boarded an on-time train and napped as the train trundled us under the sea. Modern engineering eh?

Incidentally I’ve previously asked the Eurotunnel boffins if it will one day be possible to actually charge an EV on the train, which itself is running on electricity collected from overhead wires. That would negate the charging stop entirely.

In short, it’s something they’re looking into, as it would be a huge advantage over the ferry. But they’d need to sort out some thorny issues, like the fact a Eurotunnel shuttle carries up to 120 cars and 12 buses. If they were all charging at once it would probably boil the English Channel like a tea kettle.

One other note: the jolting of the train set off an internal alert – the CLA thought someone had crashed into it. Again.

Anyway, j’arrive en France a la 1100 heures, or whatever it was I stumbled through in GCSE French. No headwind, an ambient temperature of around 18 Celsius, and nothing but miles of smooth, flowing French autoroute ahead of me. Bliss. The CLA eats motorways like a much bigger luxury car, in near silence. It’s so refined.

To increase the sense of relaxation, Mercedes recommended I use the car’s built-in nav to guide me (instead of my default choice of Waze and Zapmap apps.)

Why? Because using the integrated nav means the CLA can recommend charging stops, automatically add them to the route, filter by charging speed (I selected only the fastest 150kW+ option) and even keep track of how many are in operation. Plus it’ll pre-condition the battery as the pit-stop approaches, to lessen the charging time. Clever.

The big screen recommended the electric equivalent of a splash’n’dash near Verdun. I blindly trusted it, set the controls, and thought no more of it.

Four hours of ultra-refined cruising later, I whooshed into the service station with 20 per cent charge remaining and guess what? Of the six charging stations on site, one was broken and the other five were occupied. My GCSE French deciphered that no-one was going to move in a hurry to let a Brit plug in.

What annoyed me wasn’t the Gallic shrugs, but the Mercedes Superscreen. After all, it knew the chargers were being occupied. It has a sub-menu to show that. Why didn’t it simply automatically reroute me to the next free charger? Merde.

Bladder straining, I jabbed the screen for the nearest rapid chargers. A bank of 380kW monsters was apparently sixteen minutes away. This could be my fastest recharge ever – now that’s a story. So off we went – arriving presently on a godforsaken industrial estate. There were no chargers to be seen. They simply didn’t exist. I pleaded with a trucker who had pulled over at a nearby warehouse. “Electronique, um, le recharge, er, pour mon voiture?” “Non mon ami.” Double-merde.

A further blat down the motorway later, with charge now down to a semi-critical 10 per cent, I finally found a charger… having double-checked it existed on Google Maps. Seven chargers, in fact. And it worked first time. Spat out a meaty 230kW. After a loo stop I was blessed with 500km of range a mere half-hour later. Easily enough for the final leg to Stuttgart.

This whole palaver added about 45mins in doubling back on my route, made the recharge a smidge longer because the car got to a lower state-of-charge, and doubled my blood pressure.

The lesson? Chargers are fast. French ones especially. But in future I’ll go back to trusting my preferred nav apps than an in-house OEM car screen. Which begs the question, Mercedes: why make the entire dashboard out of so called ‘Superscreens’ when the seven-year old iPhone I carry about in my pocket is cleverer?

Just to round off on the road trip numbers, the CLA averaged 3.6 miles per kWh until I breached Germany and sat it at 130mph for several stretches of autobahn. That dented economy down to 3.4 miles per kWh, comfortably the worst I’ve seen during its loan, but fair enough given it was running at maximum speed.

My return journey was on a Saturday. I was out of Germany early enough to avoid traffic, and everyone in France was too busy rioting to go for a drive. The result was an average speed of 69mph and just 3.2 miles per kWh. Still enough for a real-world motorway range of over 270 miles. This car is immune to range anxiety.