I experienced an epiphany half way through my first drive in the Mercedes-Benz CLS 350 recently. Cruising along the highway with the climate control helping me keep my cool and the radio turned off so that I could listen to the lovely V6 exhaust note, I suddenly found a most uncharacteristic thought ricocheting around in my skull. The Merc, at R578 000, offers very good value for money! I believe all cars are overpriced, but if I had this kind of cash to throw around, the CLS 350 would be high on my shopping list.
Mercedes-Benz calls the CLS a coupé, which isn’t strictly correct because coupes are supposed to have two doors, but make my life more comfortable by relieving me of the schlep of getting out to let the kids in and I’ll forgive the wordplay.
The CLS is a brutally good-looking car. It’s sexy without being cute, if you know what I mean. Give the windows a dark tint and cruise through the shadier areas of town and you could easily be mistaken for a Nigerian drug lord.
Enough about the styling. If you want to know more you can look at the picture. The CLS is available in two models — a five litre V8 that offers 225 kW and 460 Nm — I’m looking forward to driving that one — and the slightly less-expensive 3,5 litre V6 given to me for evaluation. This car develops 200 kW of power and 350 Nm of torque, which is in fact more than adequate. Both models come with a superb seven-speed auto transmission, which the factory claims allows the car to accelerate harder than one equipped with a manual transmission would. Performance is certainly lively enough, with a 0-100 time of around seven seconds and a top speed electronically limited to 260 km/h.
One thing Mercedes-Benz does really well is load their cars with electronic gimmickry and features that are so unobtrusive you only realise they’re there if you look for them. When you know they’re there they’re dead easy to use. BMW, on the other hand, tends to produce cars that leave you feeling somewhat bewildered if you haven’t spent a couple of days — or weeks — working out what does what. The test car came with a full house of features. One of the best was the Distronic cruise control, that senses when you’re coming up behind slower traffic and eases off on the gas, or applies the brakes if necessary, and then automatically piles on the coals again when it sees the road ahead is clear. The car was also fitted with a very useful satellite navigation system, a DVD player, electronically programmable front seats (heated and leather) and steering wheel, park distance sensors, suspension that can be switched between Comfort, Sports 1 and Sports 2 according to the type of driving you want to do, and a switch on the transmission housing allowing you to select sports mode or normal, with the sports setting optimising gear changes for enthusiastic rather than frugal driving. There are also headlights that shift their focus when you’re going around corners, and when you open the doors the windows drop about a centimetre to prevent the build-up of air pressure inside the car making them difficult to shut. Close the door and the windows then move upwards to seal the gap.
The Mercedes-Benz CLS 350 coupé is a superb motorcar. It looks great, it performs well and, most importantly, it’s fun to drive. For me, its closest competitors both come from the same company — the CLK 500, which is very similarly priced with the bigger V8 engine, doesn’t look as good, or the CLS 500 that costs R107 000 more. What the heck — I’d probably borrow another R100k and have the best of both worlds — I’d take the CLS 500.