Mercedes' CLA35 Is the Cheapest AMG Car On Sale - Does it Feel Like One? - TheSmokingTire

Good morning everybody and welcome to a beautiful day on the mountain. This is the Mercedes CLA35 AMG and I have wanted to drive it for quite some time because it is the cheapest new car you can get with an AMG badge. Cheapest by about two grand. This is $54,900 base. GLA and GLB are both a little couple thousand more than that but are I would say less sporty. This is the sportiest entry-level thing they've gotten. This particular car optioned out is $62,000 which if you ask me sounds like kind of a lot and we'll get to that in a bit. But in this video we will explore a couple of things. One is the cheapest AMG still feel like a premium sporty product worthy of the badge. Number two is even though it's a front-wheel drive based all-wheel drive architecture with a four-cylinder engine and a mild hybrid 48-volt system is it still fun. And number three how does it compare in the marketplace because actually this price point is a pretty competitive segment. So the boilerplate items you've got a two-liter four-cylinder turbo front-wheel drive based 4MATIC all-wheel drive. It's 302 horsepower at 5,800 rpm and it's 295 pound-feet of torque at 3,000 rpm. The mild hybrid doesn't really provide any propulsion it really just runs some of the accessories and makes for a more effective start-stop system. When you turn the car on it doesn't go it just goes from off to on. Eight-speed automatic gearbox 0 to 60 in 4.4 seconds and the quarter mile in 13 flat that's it's actually pretty quick that's not bad for this car at all. But 3,703 pounds curb weight that is a porky little four-cylinder car. The MBUX looks like pretty much all the other Mercedes now you've got the touchscreen you've got the the gauge cluster is one big wide double screen that's sort of the thing that they're doing right now. It is quite different from the CLA 45 AMG. The 45 has quite a bit more power the body work looks a little different the wheels and tires are different. This does look like a half step but let's drive it and find out. You've got your your drive modes here you've got comfort sport and sport plus adaptive suspension is available as an option on this car but even at 62 grand this car doesn't have it. Then you've got your your manual and automatic button your traction button. We're going to go sport plus we're going to do a little launch ski here and in our in our menus we'll pull up the performance menu with metrics that show power and torque. I do love this IWC mode that's Mercedes collab with IWC watches and the stopwatch is an IWC big pilot calendar chronograph which is pretty cool and you can use that as a stopwatch but I'll I'll pull up my power and torque screen and we're into we're going to launch an automatic and then we'll go into manual so here we go. Folks today's video is brought to you by MovaGlobe. These things are the coolest we've got them here at the studio and they just mesmerize people. MovaGlobes are some of my favorite gifts for friends and family if someone moves into a new home if they get a new gig man they are so cool these globes are not connected to any power source and they spin and swirl on their own from light and not even natural light they the lights in your office the lights in your house that makes them work there's no cables there's no batteries they are powered by light MovaGlobes come in different sizes and there's art globes there's realistic globes like the earth or planets there's satellite view globes there's sports team globes there's a globe for every taste at their website so head over there go shopping get one for yourself get one for your dad get one for your mom get one for a friend and use code smoking tire at checkout hit the link in the video description type in code smoking tire checkout 10 off at MovaGlobe and thank you to MovaGlobe for sponsoring today's video good kick there it seems to have this subwoofer boom when it up shifts but only in automatic mode if i shift and no that's actually not true it wasn't doing it before oh that's because i was in sport sport and not sport plus in sport plus you get the boom so it actually does feel pretty quick on its feet and it also feels pretty agile we've got a Bridgestone Potenza tires here and the suspension is definitely tuned sporty firm but not abusive but it's a little bumpy on the highway it sounds pretty aggressive most of this road is going to be in third and fourth gear brake pedal feels nice firm hit the red line there the steering is very light it's got basically the same steering wheel you get in much more expensive Mercedes like the SL and the G wagon it's covered in buttons though i don't love the covered in buttons wheel especially not when they're haptic my wife who tried this car also didn't really love that i like that it's small on the outside but has lots of space in the front seats back seats not so much if you if you're carrying passengers around a lot you may want to go to something like a c-class with more back seat or even the the GLA which does have a bit more room back there a low headroom is not really it feels very composed poised the turn in is really sharp too i don't love the down shifts you seem to need quite a big buffer at the top of the rev range in order to actually get the gear more revs than would actually be mathematically required in this case a little water splash here the name of the game with this car is actually composure whereas the 45 range it feels sort of like manic and aggro this one feels actually a little more balanced and i like an AMG to be manic and aggro but the performance and the grip and the handling all kind of in a nice balance here genuinely not bad we'll flip around very good turning radius for a front wheel drive based all-wheel drive system i'm definitely impressed at the turning radius just because that car just went by we're just going to go into let's go into comfort mode for a little bit and with comfort mode it up shifts early it doesn't sound like much and actually it's interesting it feels like looser you know it doesn't feel everything is very soft everything is sort of doing its own thing and the whole car just has a sort of looser feeling about it if you if all you ever did was drive around in comfort mode and you didn't really turn turn everything up to sport plus and huck it through a canyon which let's be honest a lot of AMG owners that buy this for the image are going to do that it really feels on this special it's just it's just kind of kind of nothing you you really have to turn up the wick back to sport plus back to manual in fact we'll go automatic here because because i don't love the response of the paddle shifters we will see how the gearbox does on its own and we've caught a jeep which is not a surprise so far and i don't just mean right the second i mean in the last day or two the car when left to its own shifting choices stays a gear higher than i would go in almost all situations now maybe that maybe it knows something i don't know but it always seems a than it should be for the type of driving i want to do we will uh we'll wait here and make ourselves a little gap in the meantime things i really like um the burmeister stereo pretty good pretty good uh the red leather it's optional it's nice i will say the seats are not quite as comfortable as they look they look sort of fancy and and and like they've got a lot of bolstering here but they don't actually feel luxurious uh when you sit in them this one the driver's seat does have an adjustable bolster but they don't they don't envelop you in the way that that mercedes seats normally do i like that there's some manual buttons for the climate i like that there's these quick select knobs for the drive modes and i don't have to do absolutely every little thing through the touch screen um but i do have to do a lot through the touch screen i like that there's a scrolling knob here for the volume and i don't have to use the haptic there uh so far i've gotten pretty good uh fuel economy considering let's see performance so far well i've gotten 17 miles per gallon today which considering what i've been doing with the car today is pretty good actually um i've averaged somewhere in the middle 30 uh 30 range for uh for the rest of the week and that's that's pretty all right we'll do one more launch because we're here this time we'll try it in manual mode here we go so you really want to tug that paddle when you cross about 55 5600 to avoid hitting red line the thing about that is the gauge looks like it goes to seven and the definition the literal definition of the red line on the gauge isn't exact so because it's a digital screen you do want to upshift a little earlier otherwise you're going to hit the red line now i don't know what this thing is like when you're trying to make it move when you're trying to actually go beyond the limit of traction and i haven't touched the traction control yet we're in we're in sport mode right now but as long as you're keeping it within the limits of grip it's not bad it is fun it's responsive if you go up a canyon road like this you're going to have a good time for the most part it does what is asked of it as long as you don't try to upshift too close to the red line or downshift too high in the rev range you want to keep it right in that meet between peak torque and peak power so between three and 5800 so it's not a gt3 but that's where it makes its power that's where it's happy there is that there's a bit of a resonance and the floor of the trunk the the trunk floor is doesn't have a very much grip so things you put back there slide around so i've had to strap my camera case to the back seat so you're hearing it right now but you'd hear it more if every corner so now i'm just on the red line in second this sort of this gearbox response was a defining characteristic of the old seven speed in the first gen cla and it's nice to see it's carried over all right we're gonna find a spot here it's more fun uphill when you're leaning on the power than it is going downhill when you're leaning on the brakes that's an interesting thing the brakes are fine but it's it's definitely more fun to stay leaned on to the engine okay so is it a real amg for mid to high fifty thousand dollar range i think yes i think it has all of the characteristics that you would want from an amg just in smaller quantities so yes i do think it is um despite the weight and the mild hybrid is it fun yes it is fun in the right circumstance the v8 cars they're more fun in the city you know i mean they're fun on the hill as well but you know this is not fun when you're putting around light to light in urban driving then it doesn't feel like an amg when you come up on the mountain and you start to throw it around a little bit then it does come a bit alive and it's a pretty good time now in the marketplace the problem is very competitive you've got at the lower end cars like the integra type s which is only a manual gearbox doesn't have all-wheel drive but i would argue is better value for money than this car is more fun um and and and that's what i would probably buy then you've got the audi s3 that's a little cheaper than this uh same kind of power numbers and similar performance numbers but it's lighter it doesn't have that mild hybrid system it weighs a little over 200 pounds lighter um less and so those are really nice too and they have a little more space inside and i also personally prefer how they look a little more so i might consider the audi s3 then you've got if you don't need four doors you've got the bmw m240i which is about the same price as this going out the door it's all-wheel drive also and it is way faster i mean that's a really really fast car um i don't love how that looks and uh the back seat is you know not much less usable than here but if you want speed for money that's probably the fastest car in this price point so that's where you're at this sort of bounces around in the middle uh if i wanted a sedan i'd probably buy the s3 if i wanted uh the fastest car i could get i'd probably want the 240 uh or or if i didn't need a backseat at all a supra and if i wanted the best most usable fun driving sedan for this money the integra is more fun i think a little faster it's more engaging and responsive and it has a bigger back seat you could actually fit four people comfortably in that car so um but nevertheless for the uh the five dollar rock first ones free hit entry point into amg ownership yeah it does feel like an amg when you're in the right circumstance so uh shout out to mercedes for letting me have a go in this for a week i finally got a chance and and it's an interesting drive uh thank you to you guys for watching and i will see you later