Mercedes-Benz AMG CLA45 review

Spun from the latest Mercedes A-Class, it’s a bit of a tech fest inside the CLA. If it’s your first time poking your head into a Merc for a while, we wouldn’t blame you for being astounded by the vast array of screens and their head-scrambling breadth of customisation. And the slightly head-scrambling process of working out how to control them all. Though it’s actually fairly intuitive once you’ve adapted.

Being the AMG, the CLA45’s displays possess a whole heap of extra functionality too, with the usual array of G-meters and suchlike that’ll impress car geeks, but arguably few others.

It also gets an extra pair of switches on the steering wheel’s left side, which cycle through different functions via a tiny little screen. So choose two things you’ll frequently switch on and off – the ASBO exhaust mode and the stability control, perhaps – and you’ve suddenly a quick and easy way of doing so. But you’ll have likely also collated all your favourite chassis, engine and gearbox settings into the ‘Individual’ mode, too, which you can easily access with a quick prod of the new circular dial on the other side of the wheel. It cycles through the preset Comfort, Sport and Sport Plus modes when you twiddle it.

The front sports seats are great – as they should be if you’ve ticked the six grand ‘Plus’ option pack – and broadly the materials are really nice in here, though there’s a few errant clangers dropped (like cheap plastic stalks) and our test car exhibited an annoying rattle that was agitated just excellently by the über-stiff ride. Hopefully it’s a quibble of a hard-used press car, and presumably your dealer will be only too happy to fix yours if it starts rattling so early in its life.

Life in the back of the four-door CLA isn’t as poky as you might expect, and most adults should be able to squeeze in for a short journey, with anyone under 5ft 9in likely to be genuinely comfy despite its rakish roofline. If you’re worried, then the Shooting Brake adds an extra layer of practicality, especially if you flip its seats down for double the carrying capacity of its saloon sibling.